Hi,
I can understand if not many people this this inquiry is very important, but I can use all the help I can get.
My mother once purchased a sand dollar with a painting of a lighthouse on it, many years later it was knocked off it’s display and 2 pieces came off and were thrown away of it. One of those pieces contained the artist’s last name. The first name is “Marilu”.
Fastforward to the part about the lighthouse- i now have no way of tracking down the artist because my mother has suffered 2 strokes since and can not speak- my father never involved himself with things like this so all he knows for sure is that the painting depicts an Altantic Ocean scene as he has lived on both shores. Because it’s a stillife/natural painting of the nearby region I thought in one last desperate effort I might have better luck finding “her” if there was some way to match the lighthouse in this painting to a specific region. I will consult the library next, but if anyone knows a faster way I would be most grateful.
If you’re still reading then you must have a remote interest in this so here’s a description of the lighthouse if it helps: the foreground depicts typical grasses (tall and short, green) The lighthouse in the painting has 3 white horizontal bands and 2 red ones- the perch and canopy are black in color. There appears to be only one window half-way up the lighthouse or at the top of the 2nd white band. Any info would be appreciated.
I did some serious web searching and no dice. Found red bands on white that are single, triple, sextuple, and octuple. But no double red bands.
This is a conical lighthouse, no? (As opposed to octoganal, squared off, cylindrical, or some other configuration.)
Since these daymarks (as they are called) were supposed to be unique, you’d think someone would have developed a tree-query identification program or flow chart so as to identify a lighthouse by its daymark.
Some possibilities:
There has never been a lighthouse with that configuration. The artist made it up.
The lighthouse existed at one point in time, but it was repainted another daymark (indeed, some sites I’ve visited show the history of all the different daymarks that that lighthouse once had). The change in daymark could have been part of the official re-coding, or, now that lighthouses aren’t really used for navigation, the local authority has changed the daymark to whatever it fancies.
The lighthouse with the daymark once existed, but doesn’t anymore.
Not to be overly nosey, but I am intrigued by your mission. Why is finding the artist who did the little sand dollar painting on what would normally be considerd a trivial piece of kitschy tourist art be so important?
Some of them are a long way inland from shore, so what do you do with ine when you see it? I understand you can keep it on one side or the other, but how do you know how to avoid whatever it’s there to warn you away from?
I know about the scarcity of lighthouses and all that. I’m just curious about they are and were used. You know, back in the day.
Somebody’s gonna lecture about scarcity anyway, right?
Here’s some pictures of the one that prompted this thread. Kinda far from any boats, don’t you think? Pretty though.
Peace,
mangeorge
Lighthouses are generally placed where they’ll do the most good, such as harbor/river entrances, prominent land features and isolated danger areas.
You could use a lighthouse in several ways. The obvious one, is that they mark danger - the land upon which they stand.
They were also a geographical reference that mariners would use to find their way home. They would need local knowledge of the light, and surrounding features to make this work, but it worked. As they can be seen for quite a long distance, they could just follow it in to the harbor entrance, if the light was near one. Some lights in lighthouses today have “sector” lighting. That is, a certain arc of visibility will show red, for example, while the rest of it is white. This red sector will align with a safe passage into a harbor while avoiding surrounding dangers.
They also used lighthouses in general navigation as they were passing by at some distance. They would establish an initial position somewhere and run out their intended track. As the passed the lighthouse, they would take a bearing to the light, and run this line across their track line on a chart and they’d have a running fix.
You also had lightships. These were exactly as the name implies - floating lighthouses. These poor souls got to man a ship to nowhere, either marking shoals, or serving as a reference point for major shipping lanes. Not surprsising, is that sometimes in bad weather these ships were struck by other ships who couldn’t see or hear them.
I’d also WAG that early aviators, and perhaps even modern ones, find lighthouses to be valuable in their navigation as well.
To get a good fix on your position, you need TWO known points (lighthouses, for instance) visible, so you could triangulate. Seeing only one point would give you bearing from that point, but not distance, therefore not position. Each lighthouse has a distinct paint scheme and light pattern so they could be differentiated during day or night.
They don’t need to be at the waterline so much as visible from the water.
When only one object is visible at a time, you have a situation that calls for the running fix. Basically, two lines of positions obtained at different times, corrected to a common time. The accuracy of such a fix is atrocious by today’s standards, but if it’s all ya got, it’s all ya got. It was a more common nav practice back in the day.
Actually now that I think about it, there’s another way to obtain a fix on (for example) a single lighthouse that was used back in the day: Doubling the angle on the bow.
If the light bears 15° off the port bow and you’re traveling a straight course of 5kts, you’d time the run until the light bears 30° off the port bow. (Doubling the angle) Your distance to the light at the time of the second bearing (30°) is equal to the run between bearings. So if it took 1 hour for the bearing of the light to change from 15° to 30°, then at 5kts, you are 5 nm away from the light. Couple this with your magnetic bearing to the light and you have two LOPs for a fix.
As with running fixes and dead reckonings, this doesn’t take into account set and drift, so accuracy will suffer.
I didn’t mean miles and miles. From the picture it looked like there were a lot of things a ship or boat could bump into between the light and the deep water.
After reading these replies, I can see how it works.
Anyway, they are cool, and worth preserving.
There were lightships at the harbor in New York when I was in the Navy in the mid 60’s. Are they still there?
Mangeorange this lighthouse pic you linked-up to is not the lighthouse that prompted this thread- I should know, cuz I’m still looking for the damn thing. The lighthouse you linked to is the focus of what prompted your thread and this old post I made is being used as a spring-board to “crack the egg” so to say, from another direction.
So if these patterns are so distinct from each other then why are many of them strikingly similar to one another- for instance the Tybee lighthouse and the Folly beach lighthouse (SC) … so my mystery artist was never found and to me, that’s just sad…
