Anacapa Island Lighthouse

In 1932 a rotating, catadioptric, third-order Fresnel lens with a 1000-watt incandescent bulb assembly was installed in the Anacapa Lighthouse. Manufactured between 1900 and 1903 by the Chance Brothers Company in England, it was transported to the United States and stored with other lenses to be used in west coast lighthouses. As each lighthouse was built, a lens was taken out of storage and installed in the lighthouse tower. Powered by diesel generator, its 600,000 candlepower had a visibility of 24 miles!

The light from the tower’s third-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in England by Chance Brothers, was first displayed on March 25, 1932 by Keeper Frederick Cobb, who had transferred to the island from Southampton Shoal Lighthouse. Equipped with three flash panels and performing one revolution every minute, the lens produced a signature of 0.1 second of white light, 11.9 seconds of darkness, 0.1 second of light, 11.9 seconds of darkness, 0.1 second of light, and 35. 9 seconds of darkness. The fog signal building was equipped with two diaphones, one of which pointed toward Santa Barbara Channel to serve traffic along the coast, while the other pointed south to serve open-sea traffic. The light and fog signal stood roughly 270 feet above the ocean, and in 1933 Captain W.F.M. Corah of the steamship Golden Sun reported that he picked up the low note of the fog signal at a distance of twelve miles during a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

In 1980, Congress designated five of the eight Channel Islands, Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Santa Barbara Islands, and 50,500 hectares (125,000 acres) of submerged lands as Channel Islands National Park. Visitors to Anacapa Island today can see the lighthouse, fog signal building, one of the original keeper’s dwellings, the water storage building, the powerhouse, and the third-order Fresnel lens, which was removed from the tower in 1989 and placed on display in the Anacapa Island Visitor Center, formerly the station’s service building.