Oregon Coast Real Estate Knowledge Center: Coast Photo Gallery featuring Online Image Tours of Key Points of Interest found along the Oregon Coast.
Coast Photo Gallery - Central Oregon Coast Lighthouses
Heceta Head Lighthouse - Heceta Head First Order Fresnel Lens
From the Service Room Exhibit, the guided tour proceeds upwards into the final landing area of the Watch Room, 58 steps later from the bottom of the Weight Room. The Watch Room offers stunning views of the rotating lens assembly running on metal rollers and the fully automated light beacon now used as the light source. The light optics installed in the lighthouse are another work of wonder, a first order Fresnel Lens procured from the Chance Brothers in England in the 1890s and is one of only about a dozen first order lenses still in active use in U.S. Lighthouses. The Fresnel Lens was manufactured in England and contains 392 glass prisms, each two inches thick. The lens measures six feet in diameter and 12 feet in height, with a total weight of 4,500 pounds for the lens assembly. The yellow color tint of the prisms comes from the type of sulfur used during its original manufacturing process. The lens and its brass mounting hardware were shipped in boxes to the Heceta Head Area and offloaded into the ocean and floated carefully to shore. At the time, the lens and its associated clockworks were valued at about the same costs as it took to build the lighthouse tower itself. The lens had to be reassembled into the amazing creation of eight panels of glass prisms designed to concentrate the light beams. Each of the panels possessed a bulls-eye for magnifying the light, and the light produced included eight beams of light seen all at once from the lantern house, in a pattern just like the spokes of a wheel. Originally, the mounted lens rode on chariot wheels and the clocking mechanism turned the carriage based on a weight system suspended down the lighthouse trunk. The cable for the clockworks had to be hand cranked every four hours to keep the rotating lens apparatus working properly. During a time period from 2000 to 2001, the U.S. Coast Guard completed reconditioning and restoration activities on the Fresnel Lens, incorporating a new mount of the lens assembly and thoroughly cleaning the glass prisms.
Photo looking up into the Heceta Head Lighthouse’s First Order Fresnel Lens procured in the 1890s from the Chance Brothers in England and delivered to the Heceta Head Area by ship and later assembled in the lantern house during the original construction period.
Photo looking up at the magnificent First Order Fresnel Lens mounted in the lantern house of the Heceta Head Lighthouse featuring an eight panel lens design with 392 individual glass prisms (each two inches thick) and the largest lens size made in total measuring 6 feet in diameter and 12 feet tall in height, and weighing about 4,500 pounds.
Photo of the fully automated light beacon system used as the light source in the Heceta Head Lighthouse supplying light rays directed through the rotating First Order Fresnel Lens producing eight beams of light that can be seen all at once, in a pattern just like the spokes of a wheel.


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