Episode 74 - Mercury Floats

0:00 Hi everybody, I'm Emily and I'm Vince and this is the lighthouse lowdown Vince it's Vince's turn now to have the Lucky Charms latte. It's delicious. It's absolutely delicious I just laugh every time I'm editing and it just comes up every time so good. It's just exceptional And so, yeah, I made Vince break his diet in order to consume the drink of choice for the past month or so. Yep. It's a regular latte and a burrito. Anyway, I am doing something a little different for this episode. I briefly mentioned it to you, Vince, but our listeners don't know. I did a listener lighthouse and it was very short, very little amount of information because it's a. late term lighthouse i should say short not in stature but in duration yes in like very late to the game and so it ended up being really short so i was like okay well i'll just do a long history buoy and ended up being like four times as long of a history buoy as a lighthouse and so i was like maybe i'll swap them and i'll do the lighthouse for the history buoy yeah and the history of buoy will be the main part of the episode so that's what i'm going to do Very good. That's what I've decided. Let's go. Okay. So, like I said. Stretching out. All right. Now I'm ready.

1:35 This is a listener lighthouse. I want to thank you. Send a thank you to Vince's mom for sending this one in with a picture. No way. Let's go. Vince's mom. She was traveling about and sent us a picture of Hasita. Hasita head, I think. Yeah. And then she sent another lighthouse. I figured out what it was. Funny enough, my mom's like, man, I'm featured on a lot of these episodes. Really? Yeah, we're mentioning my mom a lot. So shout out. She's one of our biggest fans. I promise we actually have a lot more Listener Lighthouses to cover, but this one, obviously, it was November, so it's time to put it in the list. So yeah, it ended up not having a lot of information behind it, but I'm going to cover it. So we are going south of San Jose, California.

2:21 And it's on the same stretch of coastline as the Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Oh, nice. Which doesn't mean anything to me. Redwoods? I mean, I know of Redwoods. Is this where, like, they are? Some of them, yes. So it's like a lot, a cluster of Redwoods and people go and visit? A preserved area of Redwoods. Okay, I would see, I would go and see Redwoods. They're not that different from White House. Oh, you would be fascinated. They're, it's beautiful. Like, what do you mean? Have you been there? California a little bit, and then Washington has some as well. Okay. Yeah. Well, cool. I figured that if there was a state park or something, you would know what I was talking about. And probably a lot of our listeners as well. Anyway, this lighthouse is called the Santa Cruz Breakwater Lighthouse.

3:04 And the official name being Walton Lighthouse. Nice. But people refer to it as Santa Cruz Breakwater. Kind of like Walton. That's a nice name. Yeah. And you'll see why in just a moment. This harbor that it marks, Santa Cruz Harbor, is a haven for fishing craft and vessels. So while it has heavy traffic in this aspect, it was never like industrial or like heavy in trade or anything like that. So it's a small craft harbor area. And so the need for a lighthouse wasn't super prevalent. So it wasn't until 1964 that a box light was built and served until 1996. No history on that. No pictures. What is a box like? Don't know. Thank you for asking. 1964 is late to the game as far as lighthouses go. Yeah, it's crazy.

3:58 It's interesting though. This is mostly private use, like smaller vessels, like individuals moving their boats around better than need in this area rather than merchant ships or large trade operations. I looked at box lighthouse and it's showing me, Crafts. Box -style lighthouse. I couldn't find it before, so I just decided I was going to put the information in there for people that know, and that's the best I can do on information. Don't ask questions, Vincent. Yeah, I just knew it, too. I always have to reread my notes and be like, where is Vince going to ask the inconvenient questions, and I need to have something prepared. Actually, I did one of that this morning, and I'm going to see if you ask the question. Well.

4:44 In a quick Google search, I have also not found the answer. Okay, yeah. I don't know. It was mentioned, so I'm going to leave it at that. But anyway, after 1996, that was like a solid 30 -something years of whatever this box light was. After this, it was replaced with an allegedly ugly metal cylinder lighthouse nicknamed the Water Heater. So like not well loved by the people of Santa Cruz. And so in 1998, the community came together to discuss ridding themselves of this super ugly lighthouse and replacing it with one of classic design to more closely align with the characteristics of the town. And I've never been to Santa Cruz, but I've heard that it's like very homey, I guess. I think it's a really nice area. Like a lot of California, right? Yeah, I don't know how to describe it. Like cottagecore is kind of what I have in my mind. Oh, yeah.

5:35 Colorful buildings. Yeah, just beautiful area. Okay. Yeah, that's... Currently, it's 65 degrees there. Definitely needed a classic lighthouse and not an ugly metal thing. So it's south of, for those of you who are not California people, south of San Francisco, north of Monterey. So very much closer to San Fran than Los Angeles. Yeah. As far as... There's kind of a change in the layout. You get from... Obviously, it's still beachy, but... from Southern to Northern California, more sand to more woods. So generally. Cool. Very pretty. Thank you for the insight. I've only went to California once. I went to Los Angeles for a bachelorette party. We got to go back.

6:16 Yeah, we'll go back. I mean, I wasn't there with you at the bachelorette party. We've already discussed that I'm an East Coast gal. Loss. You still want to marry me? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, move on here. So they wanted to replace it with a classic design lighthouse. And from 1999 to 2002, a simple pipe structure held light as they began fundraising. So they got rid of the water heater like immediately and replaced it with just like bare minimum. Do you think the pipe structure was worse looking than the water heater? I bet it was just like a stick with the light on top.

6:56 I think that would be better than whatever you would describe a water heater lighthouse as. If I was getting into fundraising, I'd be like, look how ugly this is. Oh, true. Maybe everybody already knew that it was so bad. But majority of the donation, $60 ,000 was donated by Charles Walton, which is the name of our lighthouse. Charles or Charles? Charles. Sorry. I was going to say, Charles is an awesome name. So is Charles. You think so? I mean, maybe. Never heard it though. Charles Walton. Who gave this money in memory of his late brother who was a merchant seaman.

7:36 Nice. So very touching. Good for you, Charles. I know. Heck yeah. And by 2001, enough money was raised and construction began with the 41 and a half foot tall white. conical lighthouse lit on june 9th 2002 and named walton lighthouse after the late derrick walton so that's actually a pretty tall lighthouse 40 feet 41 and a half feet yeah it's kind of crazy for like at the end of a breakwater you know like they like the one that i saw um rehoboth beach uh rehoboth breakwater yeah yeah i guess that was actually pretty tall too that was definitely at least four stories so i don't know why i assume that like this late in the game marking the end of a breakwater you wouldn't need that tall of a lighthouse but yeah why not pretty cool if you raise the money do you know how much money they needed because if he he said a majority was donated by charles walton yeah sixty thousand dollars yeah i mean that's a lot of money at least it was the largest donation okay i don't mean to minimize such a big gift right but also we know lighthouses are Very expensive. Very expensive.

8:44 Even modern decorative lighthouses. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I don't know. I think it was just the biggest donation, like very sizable compared to like other people being able to give, you know, like we would give $100 or something. It's the best we can do. We're planning a wedding, so cut us some slack. So the light has a cylindrical core with a spiral staircase to the lantern room. And it has shotcrete walls, which I believe... We've mentioned before, but it's concrete that you spray on, which is something I had to look up. I was like, shotcrete. And a weather -resistant white coating and a copper roof, which is kind of fun. Ooh, I love copper roofs. I know. The light characteristic is a green light that flashes every four seconds. Nice. That's unique. A little picture up here of a little detail of the lighthouse door and what the lighthouse looks like on the end of the breakwater. Yeah, so our first image.

9:41 walton lighthouse i want to describe the door because it's awesome how would you i don't even like a bookcase door it's weirdly medieval the door part but then the door frame is not medieval it's very new england lighthouse door frame yeah but the door itself is like wood slats with the really heavy metal bar that goes across and bolts and stuff and then it has an arched top so Very cool. I love the text Walton Lighthouse. I will probably borrow that for the cover image. Oh, that's a good idea. But very cool. And then you see some water breaking in an image here with some birds flying. Yeah. What is that off on the right? There's a really. Oh, it's engineered riprap, it looks like. So precast concrete forms that kind of build up the structure. Yeah, true.

10:29 We haven't seen that in a while with our lighthouses. Especially in the U .S. Usually we have rock. Yeah. I mean, and one side of the breakwater appears to be rock and the other side appears to be engineered. So maybe that's the side that takes the most hits. Maybe they replaced some of the falling away rock over time. That's so cool. Yeah, it's interesting. But beautiful lighthouse. I can't believe it's such a recent build. It looks... Very historically accurate to some of the more adored lighthouses we know. I'd like to know if it was designed specifically for this or if they borrowed another lighthouse's design. Oh, and who's designing lighthouses in the year 2000? Oh my gosh, that's a great question. There's got to be somebody. There's got to be. I mean, I'm pretty sure they mentioned the engineer somewhere.

11:10 Engineer, architects as well. I'll have to look. Hate giving architects their due. Oh, oh no. As an engineer. Is there some feud I don't know about? No. It's just hard to work with sometimes. We're going to be hearing from architects. Yeah, that's all right. We'd like to hear from people. We make people angry so that we get more. No. We get more interactions. No rage bait here. But so notice in this picture that it has a band of red just below the lantern room. Yeah. And this is its day mark. And apparently, Seaman argued that a green light should have a green day mark. Like, they just go together. Why would you have a red day mark with a green flashing light? That's actually a fair point. I know.

11:52 So then they changed it to green in 2003. And so this is the picture that your mom sent us. Oh, cool. Yeah. Wow. So we're looking at an image again. The green day mark has changed. There's some folks standing out by the lighthouse. It is fair weather. Beautiful out there. Lots of clouds in the distance. Sunrise -ish. I will say in this photo, maybe it's the photo, the paint, the white paint looks a little aged. Yeah, it's slightly aged. In just a couple years. They didn't build it four years before this, right? Two decades. What am I thinking of? Your mom sent us this picture last year in 2004. Oh, I thought this was 2003. They said 1999 and then 03. And I was like, damn. Yeah, 03 was when they changed it to green. So now it's. Okay, two decades later, I must apologize. Right on the ocean front.

12:46 It's like only a couple of years. I'm like a couple decades. Here I am insulting the lighthouse one slide after. I'm like, wow, this is great. And presumably they still have the green flash on a beacon up there. Yes, they do. I can't tell in our photo. So the copper roof, always love those, copper cupola. I don't think there's any glass between the beacon. It doesn't look like it. And I guess you don't need it anymore, really. The beacons are, I'm sure they're designed to be outside. Yeah, I bet so. So why would you have glass if someone's going to shoot at it? Yes, if someone's going to throw rocks. Turds. For those of you who don't know, that's happened in many of our stories on past lighthouses. Yeah, yeah. It's the curse of lighthouses. They draw attention from the good and the bad. The rotten eggs and the delicious eggs. So my last note is just that there's another Santa Cruz lighthouse just 1 .5 miles west of this one. And so we'll cover that at another time. But it's not to be confused with that lighthouse, which is actually quite beautiful. It's like pretty sure it's like an integral lighthouse. The Santa Cruz, the other.

13:53 And this one is still referred to as Walton. Yes, Walton Lighthouse. But most places that I see it, it's Santa Cruz Breakwater Lighthouse. So that's kind of where the distinction comes into play is the breakwater. Cool. Yeah, that is Walton Lighthouse. Therefore, I will be moving on to our history buoy, which is actually the guts of our episode today. The meat. And I actually find it very interesting, little bit of science, little bit of engineering, some fun. Oh, my gosh. And that is Mercury floats. Let's go. We've talked about Mercury floats, but we don't know much about them. We did not cover them officially, but they have popped up, obviously, because lighthouses have Mercury floats. So I'm excited to get into the details of how they came to be and the fall of Mercury floats. Let's do it. Are you intrigued?

14:50 I am. Okay. Mercury float systems were first proposed by Augustin Fresnel in 1825. And so that was only, I think, two years after they put the first Fresnel lens into a lighthouse in France. And so he wrote, quote, I propose to float our rotating devices of the first order in a bath of mercury instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties. Nevertheless, as I have never put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse. So I don't know who he was talking to specifically, like first lighthouse. That was some recorded. Yeah. In some probably other country that was about to put in. the first Fresnel lens or something he was saying in my mind this is a great idea but I've never tried it so like I won't say that you have to do that but it's a good idea it wasn't until 1890 that it was designed and put into effect by the chief engineer of the French lighthouse service and so that was like almost 70 years later and the reason for that is that ships weren't very fast and so the fact that the rotation of the flashing lens was slow didn't matter because the average was like one flash every minute or something, which wouldn't matter if your ship was moving really slow. But then they started to have more steam powered ships, which went way faster than like wind, you know, sails and everything. And so suddenly the flash pattern was too slow. They couldn't wait for one flash every minute to know.

16:17 To slow down the ship to use the lighthouse. They put into effect the Mercury float. So I'm going to have a. So, okay. questions but you keep going okay no you can ask me well i had assumed that so we're going to talk about in detail but just maybe i'm jumping ahead a mercury float is a system in which mercury as a liquid it's metal but as a liquid is used as a barrier and a lubricant between two surfaces it's lubricant yeah it's a super dense yeah so so this system is effectively frictionless and so then you can start the rotation of something that's a couple tons with like the push of a finger and that's how they get a lens that weighs thousands of pounds can rotate with basically no energy because it's on a frictionless surface but you mentioned speed so speed of the rotation was that the primary motivation you found wow so interesting i know i had thought it would be You know, most lighthouses operate off of clockwork, so they have a weight that falls. And you still need it, because you need to power the rotation of the lens and control how fast it's moving. I'm stepping on your material, clearly. Yeah, obviously. I'm very excited, and coffee's getting to me. Well, good. So basically, the clockwork mechanism that they had at the time couldn't be optimized further than what they had. to increase the speed of rotation,

17:50 the power required to be supplied was impossible. So that they had reached the end of the limits for what they had available. And so then this mercury float just kind of like blew past what they were capable of doing with just the clockwork mechanism. Cool. And so added an extra aspect of like engineering that made it possible to rotate at a faster, as faster speed when your, your lens is 18 feet tall and 6 ,000 pounds. It has to be something revolutionary in order to get it to move. Revolutionary. Revolutionary. We saw a first -order lens at the Maritime Museum. Oh, my gosh, yeah. What? It was in Cape Cod.

18:33 Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard. Was it Gay Head Light? Vineyard Haven. Yeah, Gay Head first -order lens. Of course. We got a stamp for that. It is a huge piece of machinery. It takes up. two floors and some extra space in this museum which is built around especially even the bottom part and i'm going to show a picture of a first order lens including the bottom like mercury float and the mechanism that rotates it and all that stuff yeah it's crazy i would not have believed that existed if you hadn't shown it to me like a first order lens like standing in front of it is like Oh my gosh. Some book you're reading, like a piece of glass, 12 feet tall, 18 feet tall in assembly. You wouldn't be able to think about it. I'd be like, wow, that'd be like as big as this room. And then, no, actually it's bigger. It's twice as big as this room. Super cool. Kind of wild. So you have those assemblies on mercury floats. Yes. So I'm going to describe a little bit about it. Like I said, you dramatically increase the speed of lens rotation while decreasing wear and tear because of near frictionless mechanism and a huge decrease in power needed to get the lens rotating. So it worked with four essential parts, which varied a little bit between manufacturers because, of course, nobody's trying to make the exact same thing. They're trying to get it right.

19:56 Yeah, but there's just four main components. A bowl and all... describe a little bit more of this so there's a bowl or like a basin that holds a mercury bath so that's our second component and a float which fits into this bowl on top of the mercury bath and then there's a ball needle or roller bearings to keep the lens vertical because you don't like it's so heavy and top heavy that if there's any sort of tilt then you're losing doing. Yeah. Just you're, we would destroy it because, so the shape for people that can't see the photos that I've pulled up it, the mercury bath is shaped like a donut. And so you have a basin shaped like a donut. And if you do a cross section cut, then it's like a U shape.

20:39 And then the mercury, there's just very little that goes into the bottom of this donut shaped basin. And then the float is the exact same shape and goes. and fits into that donut shape. And so it's like two matching. Yeah, like a key into a slot. Yeah, but a donut. A donut. A donut -shaped key. So do the bearings go on the vertical walls of the basin to keep? I'm trying to picture where those would be because I was confused when we talked about floats in the past. Yeah. And, you know, I know that you can just use bearings underneath a lighthouse assembly. Yeah. And then this was the improvement here. was to use a float but i'm going to pull up a picture where you can see the mechanism okay we'll describe what we and yeah and because i haven't really like looked at where they join and stuff but the mechanism that rotates it is usually off to the side and then connects to the float system and that is what rotates so the the float part is connected to the you can see in this photo the lens support ring and that's directly connected to the fresnel lens so it's like all tightly joined and then you rotate the top half of the bath cool looks very heavy yeah a properly formed float would have only 1 16th of an inch space between the sides and this is the part that would be filled with mercury the mercury would cover the bottom and go about halfway up the sides if you had the perfect amount of mercury in there so like once the float settles in to your bowl then the mercury would go halfway up yeah to the sides

22:12 and they found that if they added more than that or a little less it didn't have any effect on the speed of rotation so they really they optimized it yeah interesting a 16th of an inch by the way for perspective i don't know if this will mean anything to anyone but an eighth of an inch is the width of a saw blade known as the kerf yeah so if you're cutting through wood you have to account for an eighth of an inch being taken away so half of that is epically tight yeah for I mean, in modern day manufacturing, all the time you're going to see tolerances that are way tighter than that. Yeah, for sure. But that is very difficult to make. Yeah. And you think about such tight, specific measurements on something so giant. Yeah. Normally there's some give here and there when it comes to like measurements with something so enormous. Yeah. But very, very specific. So they would also have a small motor or clockwork system that would still be used to run the rotation, but they would be under minuscule stress and therefore last considerably longer because it's not having to like really strain to be constantly to get it started. It would of course need to have a little more power.

23:31 Yeah. But then after that it's based, it's frictionless. So it's just kind of like no strain. Interesting. I wonder I'm, I'm coffeed up. I wonder if there was additional weight they put on to start the rotation and then they took that weight off or something like that. It would have to be a crazy amount of weight to make any difference to like 6 ,000 pounds. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, force is mass times acceleration. So if you have this huge mass, that won't change. But going from a velocity of zero to your consistent velocity is the only time in which you're going to accelerate. So that's the loading. the force on the gearing, whatever other components there might be. Once you're up to speed, effectively you're frictionless, assuming you're maintaining that speed. You're just fighting the tiny amount of friction that would come from the mercury, from any contact, from air resistance, so on, so on. Cool. Also, keep in mind that this, the functioning of the lens was virtually silent because you'd have the sound of the motor running and that's it.

24:38 And what you think about when we went to Nauset Lighthouse and how loud that lantern room was. That's electric motor. That's modern day. So obviously there's some differences there, but think about how much worse it probably was back then, how loud it was. And now it's just like silent. Well, what would, what would be, I mean, like, okay. So the rolling action itself was loud versus a float. That would be loud. We saw a. I want to say it was 1980s technology at NASET. It was very large. I'll put in a photo here or maybe in a video without noise. Maybe I'll add noise. But they were large, like can -shaped lights that were rotating about one another.

25:30 They had little vents on them for heat. But we stuck our head up there, and it was... It was an electric motor doing the rotation. They didn't have any clockwork there. And a 1980s electric motor in the year 2024. I know they're taking care of it, but still it was, you know, it was like you're under the hood of a car. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. I do have a video on my phone if we wanted to. Well, I'll put one in. I'll take a little pause on our audio and everything. Very good. Cool. So, and I also, in the picture that I have pulled up, you can see the float. was always stationary. Well, actually, okay. The float usually was stationary and connected to the lens while the bowl would be lowered with an enormous screw, like when you had to access it. So you can see in the picture that I pulled up, it's actually reversed, that the float is raised up and the bowl is stationary. You can see there's stairs bolted to it. I'm not sure what would decide whether or not they have...

26:32 a movable float or a movable bowl, but usually it was the bowl because the float was connected to so much weight that you couldn't lift. I mean, it took more effort to lift the float than it would to lower the bowl. So the example I have up here is from White Shoal Lighthouse, which we've already covered. And I think I only briefly mentioned that I had a mercury float. Michigan? In the White Shoal's lake. I can't remember. Out in the middle of Lake... Superior? Okay. One of the Great Lakes. Yeah. I do remember. It was Northside, I think. Lake Superior. Yeah. Right outside of Mackinac. Mackinac City. I'd have to look. You probably got it right. I don't know. So my question is, you have a screw, like literally like a screw. Giant, yeah. And you have, you would rotate around the screw to lower or raise for maintenance only. Yes. And then let's say the bowl came up. The basin rose and the lens support ring and float stayed in place.

27:38 That was the typical installation. The bowl would lower, yeah. So you lowered it. Now you've maintained it. I don't know what that means yet. But now you're going to put it back into place. You did an oil change, right? Exactly. You would rotate around the screw. You'd rotate the basin. And it would rise to a level at which the load would leave the screw and the load would enter. the mercury bath, so the float would take effect. So like right now the lens in this image is suspended for maintenance. The lens can't spin. But it can spin once it's lifted into this bath of mercury. You think? I don't know. I think so, which I'm fascinated by. The mechanics behind it. People were smarter in the past. At least smarter than me. They didn't want opportunities to appear smart. Now everything's being figured out, so the things that have to be figured out are like, you know, physics of like black holes and stuff.

28:42 Yeah, I guess so. A little different than... I don't think I could have figured this out, but I would love to have worked for the guy who did. I'm not an inventor, so... What's that? I was always fascinated by old -timey mechanical engineers. Yeah, you're... What's the, that you did a couple of history buoys over? The patents. Yeah. Some of the patents on the US LHS website for different foghorn and other mechanisms, float mechanisms. This is cool. Very cool. The next picture that I'm going to show may be familiar to you if you remember and listened to our Minot's Ledge Lighthouse episode. So this is very interesting.

29:23 Cape Charles Lighthouse and Minot's Ledge Lighthouse had the first mercury floats installed in America in 1895. And I mentioned that these lenses were the first and only of their kind to have a numbered flash pattern called the Mahan system. Mahan system. Yes. Yeah. And evidently, they were also at the convention showing off America's first mercury floats. So it's so crazy that I covered... this happening and didn't know like it really just goes to show that there's always like more to learn where if i had known that mercury floats came to america in like the 1890s then i may have seen that these lenses were at a convention and been like oh it says they're mercury floats i wonder if these were the first ones but i'm just like oh and they were mercury float and here you are yeah and i just like move on but then i'm like oh my gosh they were also the first ones i just Talked a whole history buoy over these lenses being at this convention without noticing that it was revolutionary in two different aspects. Historical. So anyway, I have a picture of our Cape Charles. Oh, okay. I forgot I have this also, this picture. This is an example of where the float lowers in the screw. Yeah. And so you can kind of see the top lip of this. The float system and the rest of it is just the basin that holds everything. So you would lower the basin on this one screw and then raise it back

30:56 up. So do you think the plaque that shows Grays Harbor is part of the bowl? Yes. Okay. So those high walls are the trough that is the bowl. Yeah. Okay. Really cool. Just an example there. Even old iron work used to be so cool. I know. Everything looked so nice. Ornate. So this is the picture that I was going to pull up. So this is our Cape Charles. You can see the float is that it's hiding behind the clockwork mechanism. So you can just see the edges of the top of the float. So all the rest of this was just the mechanism to rotate probably the shaft that goes up to the lens and connects to the bottom of it. I'm sure the examples that I saw before this were like fourth order.

31:47 Fourth order lenses. Some smaller. Yes. Assemblies. So this one obviously has a lot more like metal work around the bottom of it, probably because it has to distribute weight and like. I would guess with such a long distance between the bowl and the lens, especially at the top of the lens. Yeah. That's where you're going to need some bearings. Yeah. Because I had thought, well, how are they going to work with a mercury float? I would guess they're probably above it to stabilize, like you said, to keep. Keep upright. Because otherwise, that's quite a bit of loading. Yeah, for sure. Really cool. So yeah. So there's a little bit of friction there. But yeah, in areas that aren't related to the Mercury. From 1893 to 1914, the U .S. purchased three first -order float lenses, five second -order, nine third -order, five third -and -a -half orders, and 17 fourth -order float lenses. So that was the...

32:46 They were buying them. Yeah, that was when we were sourcing them from overseas instead of making them ourselves. And it wasn't until 1915 that a float was tested and built in the U .S. of our own design. And this was at Ashtabula Light Station. Ashtabula. Ashtabula. Any more info on that? No. Maybe I'll cover it some other time. But that was the site for the first... test mercury float and this was for smaller lenses and they found that to get the 4 000 pound lens moving it required 2 000 pounds force and with a float system that weight was reduced to 75 pounds to get it moving wow yeah so very significant change to getting it getting it going i bet the skepticism around this was so high because it's so it's such an obscure where do you get mercury from In the first place. Like if you had told me this whole thing and you're like, yeah, and they used oil in the basin instead of mercury, I'd be like, oh yeah. That's tools that everyone's familiar with. Mercury. This is like so obscure. I have no idea where it comes from. It's, there's, I'm pretty sure you mine it. I don't think there's a lot of places where mercury is in its liquid form on the earth, but you mine it and then like, I guess. As maybe you purify or extract it, it's liquid? I don't know. You can freeze. I don't know the properties. You can freeze mercury pretty easily, I think. Give me one moment. I can't

34:16 help myself. I was wrong. What is it? Mercury freezes at a temperature of negative, almost 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh. Okay, that's not that. that's not that cold i mean we but i that's the temperature you can achieve in america just in the air but with yeah it's tough though with refrigerant for sure you can do that well what about um like dipping dots because we came across those yesterday liquid nitrogen is typically used keep dipping dots frozen at like a temperature that's not achievable in a freezer what well you can't so i work in refrigeration and hvac you can use different refrigerants with different and different rates to achieve certain heat transfer and stay at a certain temperature. See, Dippin' Dots requires storage at a temperature of negative 40 Fahrenheit. So you can freeze mercury in a Dippin' Dots freezer. And the other side of the equation, mercury doesn't boil until 674 Fahrenheit.

35:25 The important part is that you can have it in a lantern room. Because you know how hot lantern rooms get. And I actually am going to cover some more interesting details about it. Okay. I'll keep this up just in case. So the Ashtabula Light Station was the first one to have this float design. And we made several more after that. But in 1920, the largest float system ever was built in the U .S. for Cape Fear Lighthouse, which is no longer. So it's kind of sad. It's a cool, cool name. I know. Well, it made me think of Cape Disappointment. I'm like, how many? Other like emotions are, we should like cover all the lighthouse emotions. It had an enormous first order lens that weighed 6 ,000 pounds. So this was my example for like the heaviest. Every time I talked about something being the heaviest is Cape Fear that I was referring to. And the float was also the last put into service in the US.

36:20 So 1920 was the end of like new lighthouse float systems. And this was because while it was a lot more efficient and we all know it now, it's also a lot more expensive. So that's our first, there's two strikes against mercury. Engineers hate to hear that. I know. One of them being that it's very expensive. So what could be achieved with a $15 ball bearing was replaced with $100 worth of mercury. So obviously it's, you're paying the price for the efficiency that you're seeking. As an example, a second -order lens with a chariot cost $4 ,000 in 1880, which I need to cover clockwork, but I'm like, I'm intimidated. I thought Mercury floats were going to be a short history buoy.

37:09 And here we are. And then I started researching. I was like, wow, look at all this information. My main source of information being from the USLHS had a... Shout out. I think Jim Woodward is his name. It sounds familiar. We've talked about him before. Yeah, James Woodward. He did a whole paper on Mercury float rotation. Awesome. That's what I used for most of this information. Thank you, James. Yeah, that's in our show notes, a link, so that you guys can check it out too. It's very good. I didn't include all the information. Anyway, I only cover chariots and clockwork rotation and all that in other history movies or other episodes. $4 ,000 in 1880 for one of those, and then a second order floating lens was $12 ,500.

37:52 Yeah. significant price difference and we learned more about mercury over time i mean mercury used to be readily in every thermostat yeah like i remember when i broke one when i was a kid in my mom's bathroom and the little beads went between all the tiles and i just moved them around and then my mom saw like found me like playing with mercury she's like don't touch that It's so funny. I totally forgot about that until I was researching this. And I was like, wait a minute, I've touched mercury before. Like, that's crazy. It's so funny. I had my dorm room at KU. So year 2015 had a thermostat in the room that was no longer active, but it was abandoned in place. Wow. And took off the cover because I'm an engineer. And underneath there's a mercury vial. And I would just touch it. Like it was contained. It's a vacuum. But I would just, you know, as if the thermostat was turning on and off. Yeah. I would flip it and it would watch it. Ooh, this way. Back that way. It was like a dime amount of mercury. Yeah.

38:58 Always just a little. As we learned in time that we should try to avoid toxic things. Yes. Should never touch it. Everyone don't touch it. There's still people having lots of mercury indigestion or. Indigestion. Ingestion. There were, I think this is the thing still. People make watches using mercury as like they paint it on. What? And they like lick the, it's worth looking into. We'll look at it maybe outside of this episode. Oh, are you talking about the women who would lick the paintbrushes as they were doing the watches? That was uranium, I think, or something. Something that glows. Something radioactive, yeah. I can't remember exactly. I can't remember either. They use it in a lot of like firearms stuff as well. Really? Like tritium. like night sights. Yeah. Things that are radioactive that glow. Yeah. They still, I mean, mercury is, it's dangerous, but it's used in a lot of stuff today.

39:53 Like, like medication and things. Oh really? Yeah. Something that you ingest. I can't remember what it was. I wish I'd made more. I made this, I made this less about mercury and more about mercury floats. So yeah, I pulled us off. I pulled us off track. Get us back, back in the float. Yeah. So. The first thing is that it was expensive. The second thing, obviously, the health concerns that come with handling mercury. And they actually, we've known for hundreds of years before this that mercury is dangerous. Mad as a hatter is a term that came from felt hat makers who used mercury compounds and they would have, they'd be mentally affected by their use of mercury so much so that it became a saying to be mad as a hatter. Awesome. Criminals of Rome, the worst ones, were sent to work in the Cinnabar mines in Spain with a life expectancy of three years. The mines for mercury. Cinnabar, yeah.

40:52 It's mercury ore and it's bright red. So then they would use this for like lipstick and paint. Oh my God. Yeah. It's not good. That's why they always tell you never to use makeup products from... Old days? The olden days. Well, way back in the olden days, like blue was a very difficult color to find in nature to use for decoration. So blue was the color of the Royals for that reason. Not the baseball team, but those who were Royals. Yeah. And I think that's also why it's the color of the baseball team. Purple, I think, was also. Yeah. I think any bright color was difficult. Red, I'm sure. And then gold has a long history. Cool. Really cool. Yeah. We already knew that it was dangerous. But for some reason, concerns about this and like testing and research and everything didn't start until 1980s. 1980s?

41:49 I was almost alive. My parents were 20 -something in the 1980s. I don't think we cared about the world too much. But how crazy. Like we already knew that it... killed criminals within three years of mining it in its natural form. Not even like it's concentrated, like elemental. Well, this may be naive to say, but I don't think that there's been a historical movement at any time on the premise of environmental preservation or climate change, any of those things until the 70s, which was the hippie movement. Well, that's not even environmental. That's just... Human health? It included, well, they did a lot of drugs. Wait, what are you talking about? 1970s, the hippie movement, and then 1980s was like, again, we weren't around, but like cocaine, cowboys decade, like Scarface. Not everybody was doing cocaine in the 80s, but I just mean like it was a different time. I don't think environmental studies really picked up until probably the 70s or 80s. But it's not environmental, it's... I mean, at all. Like any scientific research to try to. Oh, research in general. Like OSHA, like occupational safety wasn't around, I don't think at all until the 80s. Okay. Like people just died working on skyscrapers and mines. So just more awareness coming up in the 80s than before.

43:15 Like, oh, maybe we should care about. Like, why mercury is a problem? Well, I mean, even like, I'm a little off track, I know, but Triangle Island Lighthouse we talked about. Yeah. And the scientific research station that was out there on Triangle Island was mostly to study birds. And all the birds, puffins, I think. I'm pretty sure you said puffins. All these birds, like 80 % of their world's population is on those islands. Yeah. Away from people and other predators. And like. We just set up a couple of stations. What are they called? Connex boxes. Those big truck steel shipping boxes. That's what they're called. Military invented them. But set up those and put some lights and desks in them and started studying birds. I think all this started happening late in the 1900s. Yeah, like a curiosity for...

44:11 And with computers and technology, we could start databases. Anyways, I'm way off track. Sorry. No, you're good. Through this research, we find that mercury can get you through three different methods of exposure. And that being inhalation, absorption, and ingestion. So it's kind of like, it's tough. It's a triple whammy. You got to watch out because it can get you from any direction. You can't just not drink it. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh no. The vapors in mercury floats were reduced by pouring a layer of motor oil. Smart. Over the top, so it kind of traps it. But obviously, that doesn't stop. It's not perfect. No, and it's so hot in the lantern rooms that the vapors are inevitable. They just kind of end up everywhere.

44:57 And there were lots of stories of people being sick and working around something. Or you go into a lantern room. I can't remember which example they used. People should really go read this paper that's in our show notes because it's really good. It's just kind of a fun read. I can't remember which lighthouse it was, but it had a couple of major mercury spills. And nobody really, like, just, okay, wipe it up. So there are these tons of pools of mercury and little beads just, like, sitting in the lighthouse. Kind of crazy that they did. They were like, okay, we'll put some motor oil on there so that the vapors aren't as prevalent. But lighthouse instructions from the government made no mention of safety gloves or protection in any way from handling mercury.

45:44 And it stated that keepers should remove the mercury with a teacup and squeeze it through their hands to get rid of contaminants. Or like if there's any solids or anything in the mercury. A teacup. Remove it. Yeah, just a teacup. Just use a teacup to scoop it out. Yeah, I'm sure. If nobody ever says anything about how dangerous it is then. Wild. And they also suggested doing this during the summer months since the days were longer. It was hot, and so mercury was more volatile and produced more vapors. Man. And on top of this, mercury attacks the kidneys and the nervous system, but mostly the brain, as we saw from earlier, like Matt is a hatter. The brain is where you see the most damage from mercury poisoning. And it resulted in hard to diagnose poisoning that was impossible to reverse. If it was like some kind of acute exposure where all of a sudden you're like, then you could go and get like toxic treatment at a hospital. But if you have long -term exposure to mercury, like it just destroys you. I wonder if that plays into. So the other thing about mercury, it's shiny. And when we. I like shiny things. I would like run my fingers through it. I would put it in my teacup and I'd pour it into the thing.

47:03 Like if you didn't know, you'd be like, this is awesome. Right. Every kid would want to touch a pool of liquid silver, like dripping out. Like if you, everyone would want to come see it. They show like when they drain, when they were draining the white shoals bath, it was just like, you know, this stream of silver. It's so crazy. Everybody's in. hazmat suits i saw a video on the internet yesterday of a guy draining oil out of a car and put it under his mouth ew ew what do you why i don't to make a video because he's an idiot that's gross he's an idiot and that's clearly we know that's a terrible idea and that you know so the point is the point is shiny am i so grossed out by that anything no All right, so the point is, though, you have this shiny material, which adds to our interest in touching it. Yes. Let alone drinking or breathing it. But also, so back in the day, I wonder if the toxicity and the poisoning, the brain damage, led to some of the lore around weird lighthouse keepers.

48:14 Yes. Like the movie we watched, we still haven't talked about it much, The Lighthouse with... Who's the guy who plays? Robert Pattinson. And? William Dafoe. Dafoe. It's worth watching, I gotta say. You really think so? Yeah. Now, no. No from the beginning. It's strange. Yes. But if you enjoy film, if you would say you enjoy film. Like they're trying to get emotion out of you, so they do some weird stuff. Weird square shooting, black and white. But Dafoe is this crazy character, and part of it may be. From the lore of toxicity. So a new young lighthouse assistant shows up and the old guy's crazy. Well, maybe he's crazy because he's been poisoned with mercury. Yeah. Intoxication. It's not a word, I don't think, but mercury over who knows how long. And they have a lot of stories about one of the most noticeable long -term effects of mercury is depression. And so there were a lot of lighthouse keeper suicides off of lighthouses.

49:17 And isolation. I'm pretty sure. Repetitiveness. I keep saying things because I didn't make notes. And so they just kind of like hung around in my brain from reading this article. But there was a lighthouse in Canada that had a mercury float. And it had like three lighthouse keeper suicides because they think of the mercury float that was in there. Yikes. So it's very interesting. That's sad. So another thing that is interesting about mercury, it was just found out kind of like as we use mercury floats, is that mercury vapors react very strongly with precious metals and like mercury itself. So like if you drop gold in mercury, it dissolves. Oh. I know. That'd be sad. Well, they'd say lighthouse keepers, you know, you'd have, I keep saying lighthouse keepers. I don't know why it's like, I don't just say keepers. anyway so it's a keepers of the light they have wedding bands right and so even coming into contact with vapors it would dull their wedding rings immediately and it just would never come back unless you can go and like polish it or whatever but yeah if you if you had any contact with gold with mercury then it would dissolve it's kind of crazy but in the early 1900s aluminum was a revolutionary new material that was used for the entirety of the white shoal lantern room Oh, no. I know. One that protected a mercury float lens. Luckily, most of the walls were painted like a protective coating in between the vapors and the aluminum.

50:50 But there was an area where they didn't paint it, like towards the floor. And when they were doing a restoration, they found that the aluminum had reduced to a fine white powder. And so I have a video of what this reaction looks like between aluminum and mercury. Yeah, okay. And so I have a video. So while you're pulling that up, I'll say that's strange because aluminum today is known to be almost corrosion free. Like truck bodies and car parts that are made of aluminum are supposed to not, they don't rust because they don't oxidize naturally or they barely have any oxidation. And we use aluminum in our designs where you. want to fight oxidation instead of iron or carbon steel, things like that. Yeah.

51:39 And additional to that, it's quite difficult to paint aluminum. Really? Yeah. So the fact that they had a paint coating, any protective coating on aluminum inside that lighthouse. Yeah. It's really interesting. Well, aluminum forms a protective layer itself, doesn't it? Like an oxide. Yeah. But it's, it's very slight compared to like cast iron oxidizes like crazy. Yeah. It turns to rust. But actually once you have, a cast iron piece that's covered in rust, it stops deteriorating. If you clean off all the rust, it will deteriorate again and oxidize. So anyways. Cool. We have the, oh, what? Yeah, so they put a drop of mercury down on a sheet of aluminum. And so this is just kind of a sped up view of what happens. There's this column of very fine white crap. I don't like the up close view. Four hours. What? That was four hours?

52:34 What I really wish would have happened is that the person showing this video would have squished the column of white that happened. Because of over time and it being small bits of vapor, obviously it was a powder whenever they found it. But this kind of shows it as a very controlled environment. It forms this interesting column of white. That's super interesting. Such a weird reaction. I know. It's very interesting, though. This is just what happened in the lighthouse where there wasn't anything between the vapors and our aluminum surfaces. So I wonder, some scientists could probably tell us, but the off -gassing of the vapors of mercury, do they continue until all of the mercury is gone? Is it pure mercury that goes into the, maybe this is silly stupid to say, but like if you had water on a pot. Yeah.

53:34 And you had the heat on under it, it's going to slowly evaporate. Yeah. Whether it's boiling or not, it's evaporating. Right. And over time you'd be left with whatever calcification or the minerals will be stuck on the inside of your pot and the water would have been gone. Is there a similar effect in mercury where there's a certain amount of fumes that come off and then it's now you're left with your. I'm not sure if there were deposits or like if that's what they mean by that when the keepers had to do maintenance that they squeeze the mercury to get out any contaminants or whatever. But they did often have to refill. And that's why the bowl was like easily accessible. It's like the keeper could do it himself. It was evaporating. Yeah. And so like they'd have some amount of mercury in the lighthouse to top off the mercury bath. Something interesting. Leads again to a high risk of exposure.

54:28 Yeah, for sure. Lots of contact. Point Arena Lighthouse was the last. Could we cover Point Arena? I've heard of it. Or is it USLHS related? Point, no point, wait. I know I've heard of Point Arena, so I don't remember if that's because we've covered it or why. I think we've covered this. This was the one that was made by a guy or a company that did like industrial smokestacks or something. Okay. Very earthquake resistant. Anyway, that was the last lighthouse to get its mercury float removed in 2004 in the U .S. So officially the U .S. has no more mercury floats. However, in Canada, they had 214 lighthouses with mercury floats. And they are still in the process of taking them out of service. So there's still some mercury floats functioning in Canada.

55:17 And I'm sure in other countries too, but just a close example. I wonder, I'm sure somewhere there's an exhibit you can go see. Oh, I bet. You know, isolated. Yeah, controlled. Somehow you can observe it. I mean, you can look up Mercury, but in person it'd be really cool to see a big mass rotating on Mercury. Well, I wonder if our Cape Charles lighthouse. Oh, maybe. Maybe. You never know. And also, kind of a side quest, but remediation. You know, so having a professional come in, like you talked about White Scholl, and remove Mercury and its contaminants. In the same way we do like asbestos insulation. They talked about that in Canada. A lot of their lighthouses are integral with the Keeper's Cottage. And so when they did remediation and took out the mercury floats, they would also have to gut the house and the walls, like take off panels and everything because there's mercury everywhere, like in the house. Yeah, but no one would have thought of that back in the day. No, of course not. Oh, convenient. Yeah. Let's just connect everything.

56:19 So it's kind of funny that even with all the downsides and how expensive it is and all of that, we still ended up putting them everywhere. It was just like, oh, it's really, really expensive in comparison. But the payout was so positive that we ended up with mercury floats all over the place, especially in other countries. Like we started out kind of late and like didn't adopt as many. I'm pretty sure I listed all the ones that we had purchased, but I don't know exactly how many lighthouses we ended up having mercury floats for. Well, it's interesting that that's, and maybe there are other uses for mercury as a lubrication, but it's not lubrication as much as it is the floating. If it's truly a floating material that's not connected to another material.

57:04 Like if you could have put mercury in a automobile and it would act as a lubricant between gears and shafts, that would have been. totally under the same force discipline that would have been a force equation that would have been like world changing, but it's not a lubricant. It's the fact that there's no contact at all. Yeah. It's really a barrier more than anything. Yeah. So pretty cool. Yeah. Lots of information there for anybody that wants to look in our references and our show notes, you can check it out yourself. It's a lot of cool stuff. Lot. Of cool history. That's what you get when you come to the Lighthouse Lowdown. Yeah. Lots of cool history. You think people skip the history buoy? Doubtful. Somebody mentioned that, didn't they? Yeah. I can't remember what they said. I went to skip the history buoy.

57:57 And we must have said something about it in that one. But for the people that are going to skip this, like, oh. We have fun. Those are Mercury Floats and Walton Lighthouse. Thank you, everybody, for listening in once again. We're working our way through listener lighthouses, and I think we're going to be having an interview coming up here pretty soon. Oh, nice. It'll be pretty exciting. Next episode will be, well, I won't give away anything. It'll be number 75. Exactly. Episode number 75, and probably an interview for 76. It'll be Vince's turn once again. That's right. I've got some ideas. Okay, good. Some big ones, big ideas. I know, I need to work on them. Well, thanks for dropping in. You can check out our Instagram at thelighthouselowdown and our website, thelighthouselowdown .com, where you can watch our videos, listen to our episodes, and leave us a review. And we love reviews. We don't have a lot, so get out there and review us if you like it. That's right. And hopefully we catch you next time on The Lighthouse Lowdown.