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An Early Traffic Scheme for the English Channel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Charles H. Cotter
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Extract

The anonymous author of a paper published in the November 1857 issue of The Nautical Magazine, introduced a novel philosophy in relation to the location of lighthouses. At the same time he discussed the proposition for a coastal traffic separation scheme for the English Channel — notorious then, as it still is, for its high incidence of collisions and groundings. The proposal was made just two years after Walter R. Jones of New York made his suggestion to Lieut. M. F. Maury of the United States Navy for an ocean traffic separation scheme which materialized in the form of Maury's ‘steam lanes’ for the North Atlantic.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Navigation , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , May 1979 , pp. 266 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 1979

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References

Notes and References

1 It is not unlikely that the author of the paper was none other than Rear-Admiral A. B. Becher, RN, an eminent hydrographer, founder of The Nautical Magazine and its editor from its inception in 1832 until he retired in 1871.Google Scholar
2 Anon. (1857) Fairway lights and danger lighthouses. Nautical Magazine, 26, 569–575.Google Scholar
3Beattie, J. H. (1978) Routing at sea 1857–1977. This Journal, 31, 167–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Alan Stevenson, Engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board, was the author of A Rudimentary Treatise on the History, Construction and Illumination of Lighthouses, published in London in 1850.Google Scholar
5 During the mid-nineteenth century considerable attention was given to the construction of buoys and other floating sea-marks. It was then realized that the form of a floating object moored to the sea-bed, which should offer the least resistance to current and be capable of mounting the wave crests so as to be uniformly visible, was a requirement that Nature herself often satisfied. It was left to George Herbert to perceive, from his observations of water plants, that the cable of a buoy should not, as commonly had been the case, be attached to the lowest point of the buoy, but that it should be located on the waterplane of the buoy. The Herbert buoy was quickly adopted by Trinity House soon after it made its first appearance in about 1853.Google Scholar