The Savudrija Lighthouse and its Place in the History of Seafaring

Abstract

This study is mostly based on analysis of archival data from the State Archives in Trieste concerning the planning, construction, and opening of the lighthouse in Savudrija in the night of 17/18 April 1818. In the beginning, the lighthouse used distilled gas to produce its light; it was obtained from coal from the Raša Coal Mines. This process was exceptionally technologically innovative on the level of the Habsburg Monarchy and even the world, since a similar system of public city lighting was introduced in Vienna only in 1818, and in London in 1813. Considering the application of this facility for the functioning of a lighthouse, and according to the data available to the author at this time, it appears that Savudrija achieved a first in this area, which has since been completely forgotten. Namely, according to existing literature, the first lighthouse of this sort began functioning in 1865, when John Richardson Wigham designed a gas illumination system for the Baily lighthouse near Dublin. The gas lamp in the Savudrija lighthouse began to function 47 years earlier. However, since gas distillation facilities were still in their infancy at this time and had numerous technological weaknesses – for example, the lamps were prone to soot due to the lack of a sophisticated gas filtering and by-product separation system – and, despite the fact that this form of illumination was somewhat cheaper than oil-based systems, it was replaced by that older and simpler type of illumination in 1823.