St. Augustine Lighthouse beam
— the beam the harbour learned to count by.
Not only on a wall.
St. Augustine Lighthouse beam, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The light turns every night above the Matanzas Inlet, throwing a beam visible some twenty nautical miles offshore. The original first-order Fresnel lens, cut and assembled by Henry-Lepaute in Paris in 1874, still does the work — a beehive of prisms half a man's height, riding on a bath of mercury when it was new, now on roller bearings. The rhythm has been the same for one hundred and fifty years.
The place, in three passes.
The beam comes from the lantern room atop the one-hundred-and-sixty-five-foot tower at the north end of Anastasia Island, across the Matanzas Inlet from St. Augustine's old town. The focal plane sits roughly one hundred and sixty-one feet above mean high water. The light is the seaward marker for the inlet and the line of approach for vessels making St. Augustine harbour from the open Atlantic, a duty it has carried since the watch was first lit in October 1874.
The optic is a first-order Fresnel lens, the largest classification in the system Augustin-Jean Fresnel published in 1822 — a beehive of glass prisms that bend a single small flame into a beam visible far at sea. The St. Augustine lens was cut and assembled by Henry-Lepaute in Paris in 1874, riding originally on a bath of mercury for nearly frictionless rotation, now on roller bearings. Its characteristic is one fixed white flash every thirty seconds.
The light has burned almost without interruption since October 15, 1874 — first by kerosene, then by incandescent oil vapour, electrified in 1936, automated in 1955. Vandals shot out twenty of the original glass prisms in 1986; eleven were recovered and the remainder replaced from the original Henry-Lepaute molds in France. The lens turned again, in its original housing, in 2002. The same first-order optic still throws the beam tonight, one hundred and fifty years on.
