Patterns / Lighthouse

by jason | Nov 4, 2015 | 0 comments

If you can ever go to Cabrillo Lighthouse in San Diego, do it! You can see the --huge-- order 1 Fresnel Lens.This is the staircase up to the glass. We'll see the glass later, but about Fresnel...Augustin-Jean Fresnel, he had a huge impact on optics. Yet, if you look at his life, his early progress in learning was slow, and he still could not read when he was eight years old. After he ovecame that, he became an engineer and physicist, where he helped establish the theory of wave optics. He *designed* the glass we see in our lighhouses.He died of tuberculosis at Ville-d'Avray, near Paris; his is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.#lighthouse #cabrillolighthouse #sandiego #glass #staircase

I’ve always loved looking for patterns. If you look really closely at something, you are often surprised at finding an image you have never seen before. One really fun image is to look down a spiral stair, like the one in Cabrillo Lighthouse in San Diego (shown above). As described on the national park site,

Climbing out of his boat and onto shore in 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo stepped into history as the first European to set foot on what is now the West Coast of the United States.

I guess I understand that progress is inevitable, but I feel for the suffering the indigenous population has felt. Regardless, there can beauty in technology, and some of my all time favorites include the lenses that were used in lighthouses to guide ships along the coast. Here is an image of the first order Fresnel lens at Cabrillo, and another of the lens at Pigeon Point Lighthouse, closer to home.

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Cabrillo lighthouse lens

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Pigeon Point Lighthouse lens.

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Pigeon Point Lighthouse lens.

Love and ice cream

Sadly, these lighthouses are no more. The lenses were constructed because the lights themselves were so dim, so it was necessary to focus the light for efficiency. These days, we can just use electrical power to light a small, intense light. And besides that, ships just use GPS anyway, they are no longer guided by light. It is a thing of the past, mystical and wonderful, and we can see if we choose to.