The Eddystone rocks, a submerged gneiss reef 9 to 12 miles off Cornwall in the approach to Plymouth Sound, were hidden at high spring tides, and ships steering clear of them wrecked on France and the Channel Islands instead. Henry Winstanley began a tower there in the 1690s during the Nine Years’ War, was seized by a French privateer, and was released on the orders of Louis XIV, who said France was at war with England, not humanity. His ornate octagonal tower, lit in 1698 with 60 candles behind 36 glass panes, was the first recorded open ocean lighthouse. It vanished in the Great Storm of November 27, 1703, with Winstanley and five men inside.

John Rudyerd’s conical timber tower, built with Woolwich shipwrights and caulked like a hull, stood nearly 50 years until a December 1755 fire. Keeper Henry Hall, 94, swallowed molten lead from the burning roof and lived over a week; the lead cast of his stomach is in the National Museums of Scotland. John Smeaton’s 1759 tower, shaped like an oak and built of dovetailed granite and Portland stone set with hydraulic lime, outlasted its own rock, which cracked beneath it. Its upper part was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe, and James Douglass’s 161 foot tower rose on the South Rock in 1882.

• Douglass’s tower used over 62,000 cubic feet of granite and weighed more than 4,000 tons.
• Its seven ton rotating lens burned colza oil, reaching nearly 160,000 candle power in fog.
• Keepers hand cranked a one ton weight every hour to drive two fog bells.
• A helipad was added atop the lantern in 1980.
• In 1982 it became the first Trinity House offshore rock lighthouse to be fully automated, later running on solar power.