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The Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB) is the General Lighthouse Authority for Scotland and the Isle of Man. It is a non-departmental public body responsible for marine navigation aids around coastal areas. ==History== The NLB was formed in 1786 as the Commissioners of Northern Light Houses by Act of Parliament largely at the urging of the lawyer and politician George Dempster ("''Honest George''"), to oversee the construction and operation of four Scottish lighthouses: Kinnaird Head, North Ronaldsay, Scalpay and Mull of Kintyre, for which they could borrow up to £1,200. Until this time, the only major lighthouse in Scotland was the coal brazier mounted on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth together with some smaller lights in the approaches of the Tay and Clyde estuaries. None of the major passages around Scotland, which led through dangerous narrows, were marked. The commissioners, whose first president was the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir James Hunter-Blair, advertised for building estimates, but there were no takers. They received an offer of help from Ezekiel Walker of King's Lynn who had developed a parabolic reflector for the Hunstanton Lighthouse and sent Thomas Smith, who was making his name in street lighting in Edinburgh and had offered help, to England to learn from him. Smith soon returned and instructed an Edinburgh architect to prepare the plans for four lighthouses. The £1,200 was spent before the first light at Kinnaird Head was finished and a further act of Parliament was required which allowed them to receive half their dues before all the lights were finished. By the end of 1787 the first light had been installed. At the Mull of Kintyre everything had to be transported by pack horse from Campbeltown, 12 miles away, but it was lit by October 1788. To get to Scalpay in the Outer Hebrides and North Ronaldsay in the Orkney Isles needed boat trips across rough waters for Smith and Mills, the stonemason but all the same the job was completed by October 1789 to widespread praise. The dues which had originally been set at two shillings per ton of cargo in the seventeenth century were now reduced to one penny per ton. The Commissioners' most famous engineer was Robert Stevenson, whose sons David, Alan, and Thomas followed their father into the profession. The Stevenson dynasty built the majority of the Northern lights, in some exceptionally challenging locations. Their lights were some of the engineering masterpieces of their time, notably those at Bell Rock, Skerryvore and Muckle Flugga. Between 1876 and 2005 the NLB also maintained foghorns at a number of locations. The last (at Skerryvore) was sounded for the last time on 4 October 2005. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Northern Lighthouse Board」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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