IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 14: Passage 1

For as long as people have travelled by sea, the most dangerous part of a voyage has been its beginning and its end, when a ship close to land may be driven onto rocks or run aground. Early sailors therefore preferred to travel by day, keeping within sight of the shore and steering by familiar landmarks. Where a light was needed, the simplest solution was a fire on a hilltop, and Homer's Iliad describes sailors at sea catching sight of just such a fire blazing high in the mountains.

The first true lighthouse, and for many centuries the most celebrated, was built at Alexandria in Egypt. The city, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, was becoming a major Mediterranean port, but its approach was hazardous. The coast of the Nile Delta is low and flat, with few natural features that a sailor could pick out from a distance, and the waters near the harbour concealed rocks and shallows. Work on a great tower began on the island of Pharos, at the mouth of the harbour, under Ptolemy I, and it was completed by his son Ptolemy II, probably around 280 BC. Ancient sources link the building with a man named Sostratus of Cnidus, although it is unclear whether he designed the tower or simply financed it.

No one knows exactly how tall the Pharos was. Estimates based on ancient and medieval descriptions vary considerably, but most suggest a height of more than 100 metres, which would have made it one of the tallest structures of the ancient world. It rose in three stages: a massive square base, a narrower eight-sided middle section and a cylindrical top, where a fire burned at night. In daylight, the tower itself served as a landmark that could be seen far out to sea. Medieval writers told of a huge mirror at the top, but most historians treat such stories with caution.

The Pharos survived for well over a thousand years, but a series of earthquakes left it badly damaged, and during the fourteenth century it fell into ruin. In the 1470s, the Sultan Qaitbay built a fortress on the site, reusing some of the fallen stone. The lighthouse nevertheless left a lasting mark on language: the name of its island became the ordinary word for a lighthouse in several European languages, including 'phare' in French and 'faro' in Italian and Spanish.

The Romans built lighthouses at many of their ports, and several still stand. At Dover, on the English side of the Channel, one of a pair of Roman lighthouses survives in the grounds of a medieval castle. The most remarkable survivor, however, is the Tower of Hercules at A Coruña in north-west Spain, which dates from around the end of the first century AD. Although its outer walls were rebuilt in the late eighteenth century, its Roman core is intact, and it is still in use as a lighthouse today.

After the fall of Rome, few lighthouses were built in Europe until trade revived in the Middle Ages. Many medieval lights, however, were modest affairs, often maintained by monks or by local lords who charged passing ships for the service. Fuel was a constant problem. Firewood and later coal were burned in open fires on top of the towers, where the flames were exposed to wind and rain, so that a light was often at its weakest in precisely the storms in which it was most needed.

The greatest challenge of all was to build a light not on a headland but on a rock in the open sea. The Eddystone reef, off the English port of Plymouth, had wrecked many ships, but it is almost covered at high tide and exposed to Atlantic gales. The first tower there, built by Henry Winstanley, an engraver with a passion for mechanical devices, was an elaborate and richly decorated wooden structure. It was first lit in 1698, but five years later it was swept away by the Great Storm of 1703, together with Winstanley himself, who was carrying out repairs. A second tower, designed by John Rudyerd and completed in 1709, was a simple cone built mainly of timber, and it stood for nearly fifty years before being destroyed by fire in 1755.

John Smeaton, the engineer chosen to replace it, took his inspiration from the trunk of an oak tree, which is broad at the base and narrows as it rises. He built his tower from blocks of granite, each cut so that it locked into the stones around it, and he developed a lime mortar that would set even under water. Completed in 1759, Smeaton's lighthouse stood for more than a century and was taken down only when the rock beneath it was found to be eroding; its upper part was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe. Even so, it was at first lit only by candles; lighting was transformed later, by brighter oil lamps and then, in the 1820s, by the glass lens of the French physicist Augustin Fresnel, which concentrated light into a powerful beam.