The Twin Lights Century

The most technologically important lighthouse in America stood on a hill in Highlands, and almost every American lighthouse of consequence between the Civil War and radar owed it something.

That will read as exaggeration to anyone who hasn't followed the drumbeat. Optics, then electricity, then radio, then radar — each one arriving in this country for the first time on the same two hundred feet of bluff, in front of the same view.

There are two towers because there had to be. Sandy Hook Light stood five miles north and the Sandy Hook Lightship sat offshore, and a single beam on the Highlands would have been one more white light in a row of white lights. Two towers, one fixed and one flashing, could not be mistaken for anything else on the coast. The station was built to be legible.

Then it kept being used to try things.

Charles Smith of Stonington, Connecticut built the first station for $8,440 — two towers with a keeper's dwelling midway between them. David Melville of Newport supplied the lamps and reflectors for $1,850.

Joseph Doty lit them first. The north tower showed a fixed white light and the south a flashing one, and from that night a captain standing off the coast could tell where he was without counting anything.

It was one of seven American stations built with two towers. It is the only one anybody remembers.

Sources · Lighthousefriends on Smith, Melville, Doty and the twin-tower rationale · historic-structures.com on the confusion with Sandy Hook Light and the lightship.

In 1838 Congress directed Stephen Pleasonton, Fifth Auditor of the Treasury and the man responsible for the country's lighthouses, to acquire two Fresnel lenses. Pleasonton had spent two decades preferring the cheaper reflector system already installed everywhere, and the interesting part of the story is that he is the one who went and got them. He sent Commodore Matthew Perry to examine the lighthouses of England and France and to arrange a shipment: one first-order fixed lens, one second-order revolving.

They were made by Henry Lepaute in Paris. They were too big for the towers standing on the bluff.

So the towers were raised nine feet.

The installation was finished in 1841. The fixed lens went in the north tower and the revolving one in the south, and Navesink became the first lighthouse in the United States to be equipped with a Fresnel lens. Not the first to be offered one, or to be considered for one. The first to have one lit.

The verdicts came quickly. T. A. Jenkins of the Coast Survey reported that the French lens lights at Navesink and at Sankaty Head were, for brilliancy and range, beyond any others he had seen in the country. The Lighthouse Board later called them the best lights on the American coast, and said they should be considered equal to European lights of the same class — which, in 1852, was not a thing Americans were in the habit of saying about American infrastructure.

The rest of the country waited another decade. Wide adoption of Fresnel lenses in the United States didn't happen until after the Lighthouse Board took charge of the system in 1852, by which point the Service had settled into a habit it would keep for a century: try it at Navesink first.

Sources · Lighthousefriends and us-lighthouses.com on Perry, Lepaute, the nine-foot raise and lens placement · NJ DEP confirms first-order fixed in the north tower · historic-structures.com for the Jenkins and Lighthouse Board assessments. Open: one source reverses the lens placement; three, including the state operator, agree on north-fixed.

The wooden towers of 1828 lasted a generation and are largely forgotten. What the town pictures when it says Twin Lights is the rebuild.

Joseph Lederle's design set two towers at the ends of a long masonry keeper's range, all in local brownstone, 64 feet high on a hill two hundred feet above the water. The towers are deliberately unalike — the north octagonal, the south square — so that even by daylight the station could not be confused with anything else.

The fortress look is not an accident. The Union Army had been on Sandy Hook for a year when construction started, and the country was still at war when the towers were topped out.

It has been standing ever since. Everything else in this chapter was installed into it, tested from it, or invented on top of it.

Sources · NRHP 70000389 for Lederle and the 1862 dates · The Wild Edge and historic-structures.com for materials, height and tower geometry. Open: which tower is octagonal. Accessible sources put it on the north side — including the tower relit in 1962 and open for climbing — and this chapter follows them. Pending confirmation against the NHL nomination file.

Ellis Island had opened the year before. Steamships were passing the Highlands every day with thousands of people aboard who had never seen America, and the first thing any of them saw was this hill.

A New Jersey man named William McDowell, who had founded the Sons of the American Revolution, thought there ought to be a flag on it big enough to matter. He raised $571.50 in public subscriptions — small amounts from strangers — and put up a pole 135 feet tall, nearly twice the height of the lighthouse behind it.

The dedication was timed to the fleet. An international flotilla was gathering at Hampton Roads and steaming north to anchor in Sandy Hook Bay ahead of the naval review in New York Harbor on April 26, so McDowell set his ceremony for the morning of April 25 and timed the flag-raising to the warships passing below.

It rained. The crowd stood in it anyway, and heard the Pledge of Allegiance given as the national oath for the first time.

Both were still a generation away. The thing that was read on this hill is not quite the thing children say in classrooms now, and the difference is most of what has happened to the country since.

Who wrote it is not settled. Francis Bellamy, a former minister working for The Youth's Companion, has long been credited, and he swore in affidavits before his death in 1931 that the words were his. An 1892 newspaper clipping surfaced later pointing to a Kansas high school student named Frank Bellamy — no relation — who may have written them first. We don't know. Bellamy the adman was on this hill in the rain, and that much is documented.

The pole is gone. A modern flagpole and a marker stand where it was. The bluff is otherwise unchanged.

Sources · twinlightslighthouse.org and NJ DEP “The Pledge at Navesink” (Nicholas Wood) for McDowell, the $571.50, the pole height and the 1893 wording · Edge Magazine for the flotilla scheduling · the Daily News for the authorship dispute. Open: a flag believed at the time to be John Paul Jones's was hoisted by an Adlai E. Stevenson — Vice President in 1893, and the source is ambiguous about which man and in what capacity. Omitted until confirmed.

The south tower got a bivalve lens nine feet across, throwing 25 million candlepower. It was seen from 70 miles away.

The arc lamp at its center needed more current than anything on the hill could supply, so they built a generator on site — and that made Twin Lights the first electrically powered lighthouse in the United States.

The north tower went dark the same year. One tower now did the work of two, and did it better than any light on the coast.

The lens is still here. It sits in the power station building that was built to feed it.

Sources · Clio 75083 for the candlepower, range, generator and first-in-country claim · The Wild Edge for the lens dimensions and current location · NRHP record for the north tower's 1898 deactivation.

James Gordon Bennett Jr., who owned the New York Herald, invited a twenty-five-year-old Italian to America to cover a boat race.

Guglielmo Marconi put an antenna mast on the Twin Lights grounds and a transmitter aboard the passenger ship Ponce. On September 30, 1899, before the race he'd been hired for, he used it to report something else: Commodore George Dewey's fleet coming home from Manila Bay. That was the first working use of wireless telegraphy in the United States, and it was a homecoming parade.

On October 3 the same apparatus reported the America's Cup races between Shamrock and Columbia, sailing off the tip of Sandy Hook. That was the first commercial use — a newspaper paying for information that arrived through the air.

It made Twin Lights the country's first wireless station able to send and receive on a regular commercial basis. Within a generation the company built on that capability employed thousands of people, and no ship went to sea without a radio room.

Marconi didn't stay. He kept the station only a short while before concluding that other places on the American coast had better reception, and he moved on. He was right, and it doesn't matter. The thing had already worked here first.

Sources · Monmouth Timeline for the September 30 date, the SS Ponce and the Dewey reports · NJ historical marker HMDB 208250 for Bennett's invitation and the October 3 Cup reporting · NJ DEP for the commercial-basis framing.

The Army had been watching this hill for a while.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, experimental electronics developed at Fort Monmouth — a few miles inland — were brought out to the bluff and tested against the sea. The newspapers called it the mystery ray. It was radar, and prototypes from that work were in service early in the Second World War.

Optics in 1841, electricity in 1898, radio in 1899, radar in 1935. Four technologies that changed how ships find land, and all four of them were tried out on the same two hundred feet of New Jersey.

Sources · NJ DEP for the Fort Monmouth attribution and the 1920s–30s testing window · Atlas Obscura for the 1935 date and the “mystery ray” name.

The south tower ran on electricity until 1949, when the station was automated, and was discontinued as a primary aid in 1952. For ten years the hill was dark.

Then the town turned the light back on itself. The Shrewsbury Power Squadron — local boaters — acquired a sixth-order lens and presented it to Highlands, and in 1962 the borough handed the site to the State of New Jersey with the north tower relit. It is not a memorial. It is a working private aid to navigation, and it is burning tonight.

The Twin Lights Historical Society had formed in 1956, a group of residents who thought the place was worth saving before anyone official agreed. In 1979 they got the 1841 lens back.

Every ship still entering New York Harbor passes within sight of the hill Marconi's signal left from. That is not sentiment. That is geometry.

Sources · NRHP record for the 1949 automation, 1952 discontinuation, the Shrewsbury Power Squadron lens and the 1962 transfer · us-lighthouses.com for the Historical Society's 1956 founding and the 1979 lens return.