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Fact-check log
Where a good source disagrees with another good source, or with a caption that would be easy to repeat, this site keeps both in view rather than picking a winner.
Fastnet’s range
Irish Lights records that the light was converted to electric on 10 May 1969, and then had a range of 28 nautical miles and a power of 2,500,000 candelas. Those are historic figures: the range published on the same page today is 18 nautical miles.1 The 28-mile figure is a historic electric range from 10 May 1969. The 18-mile figure is the range Irish Lights publishes for the light today. Both are on the same official page.
1911 is not a List of Lights
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica places the Bell Rock 12 miles off the coast of Forfarshire, and says the tower is submerged to a depth of about 16 ft at high water of spring tides. It names Robert Stevenson as the constructor: work began in 1807, finished in 1810, and the light was first exhibited in 1811. The tower is given as 100 ft in height.2 The 1911 Britannica describes Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse as an 89 ft granite tower on a reef off Boston Harbor, Massachusetts, completed in 1860.2 Those measurements stay on the history page, labelled as a 1911 snapshot. They are not entered in the desk of current characters.
A Commons caption we did not repeat
The Library of Congress photochrom of Eddystone is a genuine historic view of Douglass’s tower and Smeaton’s stump. The Commons file description, though, dates the Douglass tower to 1822 and places it in Plymouth Sound. Eddystone Lighthouse was built by Trinity House in 1882, the fourth lighthouse to mark the Eddystone Rocks.3 Trinity House places those rocks 13 miles south west of Plymouth.3 This site follows Trinity House, not that caption.
Hook Head’s beginning
According to tradition, as Irish Lights tells it, Saint Dubhán established a beacon on Hook Point. The same page says that more recent authorities attribute Hook Tower to William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in 1245.4 Tradition and a later attribution can both be reported. Neither is inflated here into “the oldest lighthouse in Europe.”