The Lighthouse Stevensons: The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson

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One of the curiosities was that the Stevensons were responsible (or assumed responsibility) for the lighthouse keepers - insisting there should always be three, so that if one died another could not unfairly be accused of murder, the fear of this occurring had apparently led a lighthouse keeper not to have reported the death of his colleague who instead mouldered grimly in the lighthouse. And the civil authorities felt like it was a private problem for ship owners, not something that society should spend money on. It's hard to imagine this book being any better than it is, for what it is--the fascinating story of an extended family that took it upon themselves to make the wild coast of Scotland safer for centuries of mariners. Of course, the famous Stevenson family were responsible but thankfully RLS decided that the life of an engineer was not for him. Here is a family of engineers who spanned four generations and produced a children's story author, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala, the teller of tales.

After being pressured to join the family business, Robert Louis Stevenson pursued a literary career that produced “ Kidnapped”and “ Treasure Island”. Read on for the story of the ‘Lighthouse Stevensons’ and their invaluable contribution to lighting up Scotland’s coastlines.

The author did a really good job striking a balance between writing about the lighthouses and about the men (the women in their lives really didn't feature much at all beyond Louis' grandmother) who built them.

It remained in use until 1985 when the last lighthouse keeper was withdrawn and the light was automated. His mother remarried Thomas Smith, a lamp maker, mechanic and civil engineer who had been appointed to the inaugural Northern Lighthouse Board in 1786. A very interesting history and surprising, that despite being overshadowed by Robert Louis Stevenson's literature, his forebears were phenomenal engineers of the Victorian era and particularly of Scottish Lighthouses. Thomas Stevenson was both a lighthouse designer and meteorologist who designed over 30 lighthouses over the course of his life.

If the sea was making it difficult, so too were the press-gangs ready to bundle men off to the Napoleonic conflicts overseas. You don't have to be interested in lighthouses, or history, or science, or even Stevensons to be drawn into this story of incredible feats of engineering ingenuity and physical fortitude brought forward by sheer force of will and determination. An interesting history of the family who built lighthouses in Scotland and beyond, whose family name was immortalised by the author Robert Louis Stevenson, along with a select few of the works … I would have rated it higher but for the authors annoying habit of repeating information, two or more times throughout the book. The Stevenson's were also responsible for lights in other parts of the world, and their engineering influenced lighthouse building everywhere.

Elsewhere, many Irish Lighthouses and Lighthouses in the Colonies were fitted with apparatus prepared under the superintendence of Robert Stevenson. The Lighthouse Stevensons is just as much about the devotion and legacy of family as it is about the towers of light scattered along the Scottish coastline. Other than that, it is a well-written story of a family, obsessed with the building of lighthouses, especially Scottish ones.Overall, I think my interest level would have been better addressed by a thorough magazine or web article. The first mention of Robert Stevenson in connection with the Northern Lighthouse Board was in 1794 when Engineer Thomas Smith, entrusted Robert with the Superintendence of the erection of Pentland Skerries Lighthouse. Louis was the tantony pig of the family, who, as Bella Bathurst says, with only small exaggeration, 'stole all the fame that posterity has to give'. Robert Stevenson is the ghost at the feast and his uneasy spirit presided over the family long after his death in Bathurst's account. It is a fascinating story, and the reader will get a full appreciation of the technical and logistical difficulties involved, compounded at times by some of the most frightening and powerful weather on the planet.