29173. Chance, Toby and Peter Williams. Lighthouses – The Race to Illuminate the World. London. 2008
Welcome to Kenrick A. Claflin & Son
Featured on our web site and in our monthly web catalogues are new and out-of-print books, documents, post cards, photographs, maps and charts, engravings, lithographs, uniforms and insignia, tools, lamps, lens apparatus, equipment and apparatus and much more relating to these heroic services.
We now issue most of our catalogues on line rather than by mail. This allows us to issue more catalogues and feature more items, with better photos and descriptions. Let us know your email address and we will email you monthly as our catalogues are posted.
Type in your search word. After hitting Enter you will automatically be brought back to this page. Scroll down to this spot to see the results of search. Pages containing your search word will be listed. You will be allowed to click on the pages found. When on each page, Windows Explorer will allow you to use Ctrl + F to bring up a search box for that page. Type in your search word again and hit “Enter”. You will be taken to that item.
29173. Chance, Toby and Peter Williams. Lighthouses – The Race to Illuminate the World. London. 2008
29173. Chance, Toby and Peter Williams. Lighthouses – The Race to Illuminate the World. London. 2008. 272p. DJ. Illustrated. Written by Toby Chance, James Chance’s great-great-grandson and grandson of Sir Hugh Chance, the last Chairman of an independent Chance Brothers, Lighthouses attempts to fill the gap in lighthouse history concerning the development of illumination technology during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The main characters are James Chance, who started the lighthouse department at the firm founded by his uncle Lucas Chance in 1822; and Sir David Brewster, a radical Scottish optical scientist whose entreaties to the British establishment to take the lighthouse question seriously from the 1820s were largely ignored until a Royal Commission on lighthouse reported in 1861. During this time Britain lost its lead in lighthouse technology to the French, mainly due to the invention in 1819 of what has come to be known as the Fresnel lens, named after its inventor Augustin Fresnel. Fresnel, like Brewster, was an optical physicist but unlike Brewster was entrenched in the French scientific establishment and was hired by the Astronomer Royal to head up the French lighthouse service’s investigations into improved methods of lighthouse illumination. The true-life story that follows is of one man and his family’s unexpected role in an exciting race to perfect this technology, against European rivals and colleagues, as they strive to regain for Britain the leadership position she had lost to the French in the 1820s. A must for serious lighthouse enthusiasts. (M). $26.99