22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 3-9, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com above where he’s standing, as people pack the hot room like tinned sardines. “Our light sat right up in here. It basically filled the room close to the glass windows on the side.” Part of the draw to these Fresnel lenses—beyond their beauty and magnificent design—is their versatility and the unique role they played at each lighthouse. The lenses could either be fixed, shining a steady beam out to sea, or rotating, blinking at set intervals to increase visibility and give each lighthouse its distinctive light characteristic. Even in these seemingly straightforward technical details, lore persists. Myths about these lights and their design have led to the common misconception that a lighthouse’s light source changes intensity. In reality, the light remains constant—it is only the lens that creates the effect. The first order Fresnel lens is 8 feet high and 6 feet in diameter, with 16 panels and 568 glass prisms, weighing almost 4,000 pounds. Including the hardware, foundational structure that holds the prisms and mirrors in place, and its turning mechanisms, the entire assembly weighs 12,700 pounds and stands 18 feet high. A lens this size and weight would not be able to make it up to the tower via the bridges in their original state; in 1960, one of the five bridges failed when a delivery truck was driven across it. As technology advanced and lighthouses became less essential, the lens at Point Sur Lighthouse became automated in the 1960s. And in 1978, the lens was moved to the Monterey Maritime Museum, now Monterey History and Art at Stanton Center, located at Custom House Plaza in Monterey. “The Fresnel lens was a quantum leap forward in technology,” says Stuart McDowell, a docent at the Point Pinos Lighthouse in Pacific Grove, which still has its original lens in place—a smaller, third order Fresnel lens. “There is no other system that works as well at refracting light.” He adds that the design of the lens was such that only 10 percent of the light escaped—capturing 90 percent of it. Today, this design is used most notably in car headlights, where a small light behind the plastic or acrylic lens turns into a spotlight. At Point Pinos Lighthouse, they make a point of this by placing a 4-watt bulb behind a fourth order Fresnel lens, a much smaller lens around 2 feet 8 inches tall, enabling visitors to observe the light beam out from the glass. “When we took over the lighthouse in the early 1990s, CCLK started restoring the place because it was in such bad shape,” Stiles says. “We hired a company from New York to handle the restoration—they also restored Pigeon Point—to bring it up to standard so we could get our Fresnel lens back.” Nearly a decade after CCLK began working to get the Fresnel, it still hasn’t returned. People who are drawn to Point Sur Lighthouse and the meaning of this lens relish in the details, from the steam-powered fog signals and kerosene-fueled light to the geological intricacies of the site: the Franciscan greenstone (a type of rock) and the old Farallon tectonic plates that played a significant role in shaping the Big Sur coastline and the rock through metamorphism. Docents undergo a minimum of 70 hours of training, which includes attending classes, alongside independent study time, several visits out to Point Sur to shadow tours, and, of course, creating their own tour plan— detailing both the information they’ll share and how they’ll guide their visitors. “It’s a pretty big commitment. The training goes anywhere from threeand-a-half months or so,” Hansen says. CCLK and State Parks have spent roughly $4 million on the bridges alone, with additional funds directed toward restoration projects related to Point Sur. Outside of the lighthouse stands a series of keepers’ homes where the families lived. Today, these homes are carefully restored, full of historical mementos and furnishings that reflect the era in which the families lived— thanks to the volunteers and a series of grants they secured over the years. It is estimated that the volunteers put in $125,000 worth of labor, not including the furnishings, according to Point Sur historian and CCLK member Carol O’Neil. “The whole point of doing that is to evoke some sort of emotion,” O’Neil says, speaking to the curated setup of the space which brings a guest back in time. “We get that response from a lot of people, especially the chrome dining set, people will come in and say, ‘My grandma had that!’” While the Fresnel lens remained at the Maritime Museum for a couple decades, CCLK members over time grew concerned about its state and care. All lenses are technically owned by the U.S. Coast Guard, and when they’re in museums, they’re on loan. After the Maritime Museum fell on hard times in 2010, Carol O’Neil’s records show that volunteers from Point Sur were called to help clean the lens. Eventually, the calls stopped, which caused concern among the group. The tricky thing about million dollar lighthouse lenses, O’Neil says, is that once you remove a Fresnel lens from a lighthouse, it transforms from a piece of equipment into a museum piece—an artifact. Once an artifact, it is precious, and requires special ways of taking care of it. It needs to be in a climate-controlled environment, there must be control over the way the light hits the glass, there need to be alarms established in case of disaster and the building has to be earthquake safe. Eventually the museum could no longer care for nor cover the cost of transferring the Fresnel lens into storage, which had to meet the U.S. Coast Guard requirements. As a result, the CCLK paid for a lampist—an expert in handling and transporting such equipment—to oversee the transfer. CCLK Above: A docent at Point Pinos Lighthouse in Pacific Grove holds up a binder depicting a first order Fresnel lens. He notes how small the person in the background of the photo appears; first order Fresnel lenses hovered around 8 feet tall. Right: Point Pinos Lighthouse in Pacific Grove still has its original lens in the tower, a third order Fresnel—much smaller than Point Sur’s lens. KATIE RODRIGUEZ KATIE RODRIGUEZ KATIE RODRIGUEZ Rounding the first corner walking up Point Sur, visitors can see the lighthouse tower peeking out from behind the rock.
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