Account of the Skerryvore lighthouse : $b with notes on the illumination of lighthousesStevenson, Alan
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Account of the Skerryvore lighthouse : $b with notes on the illumination of lighthouses
Stevenson, Alan
Skerryvore Lighthouse (Hebrides, Scotland)
The only remaining point, in which the example furnished by the
Eddystone and Bell Rock Lighthouses has been at all materially departed
from, is (as has already been hinted at by an unavoidable anticipation)
the mode of uniting the different parts of the masonry together. In
both these Towers the stones were dovetailed throughout the buildings,
chiefly (at least in the case of the Bell Rock where the foundation
was so much below the tide) with the view of preventing the sea from
washing away the courses which might be left exposed to the winter
storms before the weight of the superstructure had been brought to bear
upon them. In the upper part of the Bell Rock my father also introduced
a kind of band joggle, which consists of a flat ribband of stone raised
upon the upper bed of one course, and fitting into a corresponding
groove cut in the under bed of the course above; and this system of
tying the adjoining courses together also forms a chief feature in his
design for a Lighthouse on the Wolf Rock.[16] When the great pressure
of the superstructure of these Towers, however, and the effect of the
mortar are considered, there seems little probability of one course
being dislocated, in defiance of the friction resulting from the
weight of the column. An impulse sufficient to produce such an effect
would tend to overset the whole superstructure from mere deficiency
in weight, and in this case the joggle would have little effect. But
if joggles be thought necessary for this purpose, the ribband form
certainly produces a better arrangement than that of the cubic joggles
employed by Smeaton for connecting the adjoining courses of his
building together, as the sectional strength of these scattered square
joggles is very small compared to the effect of a shock which could
be supposed capable of moving the whole mass of a Tower. In the lower
parts of the Skerryvore Tower, I entirely dispensed with dovetailing
and _joggles between the courses_, and thus avoided much expensive
dressing of materials. The stones were retained in their places during
the early progress of the work, chiefly by common diamond joggles, and
the courses were temporarily united to each other by wooden treenails,
like those used in the Eddystone and Bell Rock. These treenails had
split ends, with small wedges of hardwood loosely inserted, which being
forced against the bottom of the holes in the course below, into which
the treenails were driven, expanded their lower ends until they pressed
against the sides of the holes; while their tops were made tight by
similar wedges driven into them with a mallet. I have, however, adopted
the ribband-joggle in the higher part of the Tower, where the walls
begin to get thin in the very same manner as at the Bell Rock, where it
was used, partly that it might counteract any tendency to a _spreading_
outwards of the stones, and partly that it might operate as a kind
of _false joint_ to exclude the water which, when pressed with great
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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