I for one had no idea that the 14 lighthouses dotting the Scottish coast were all built by the same Stevenson family that produced Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland's most famous novelist. And preachers would tell them on Sunday, "It's the will of god to put rocks there and to send ships to be battered against them. 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. During his term as chief of the Northern Lighthouse Board, Alan Stevenson built 13 lighthouses in and around Scotland between 1843 and 1853, and over the course of his life designed over 30 in total.

Her journalism has appeared in a variety of major publications, including the Washington Post and the Sunday Times. There's a lot of that, and a lot of narrative of how the Stevenson family, generation by generation, wrote the book on engineering not just the lighthouses but the long-range lights that were the main event once the towers were in place.The book tells of the incredible difficulties of creating those lights, and gave an insight to the men behind them. Of these, the iconic Bell Rock Lighthouse situated off the coast of Arbroath was the most important work of his life and undoubtedly an incredible engineering achievement. The book is written for the layperson, so it includes both history and technology, and it attempts to go fairly light on the tech side, but while still explaining the extraordinary achievements.

It was fascinating how Robert Stevenson and his team built it in stages, only during low tide at first, and they would stay on a ship nearby for the entire season as they built. It has been claimed that Fidra Island on the east coast of Scotland inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island’. Here is the story of a family who does not seem as if they could exist in our modern world of short attention spans.In the 18th century Thomas Smith married Robert Stevenson’s widowed mother which merged their two families, and thus began from scratch the building of the lighthouses in Scotland.