Canadian Coast Guard
<% else %>A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton
The Dominion Lighthouse Depot
With the development of lighted buoys in the Montreal to Kingston Division, which had been transferred from Railways and Canals to Marine and Fisheries in 1903, the need arose to have a repair and maintenance depot within reach. Temporary quarters had been in use at Morrisburg in the previous year and, in November 1903, the Department established a permanent base when they bought the land and buildings of the Labatt Brewery at Prescott which was converted into the Dominion Lighthouse Depot. Here was manufactured special apparatus for the lights of Canada, and here conducted the experiments by which the service was continually kept up to date. Here also, for the first time, Marine and Fisheries established a marine agency in the Great Lakes.
CCGS Grenville loading buoys in the Seaway at the opening of the season.
The coming of the Lighthouse Depot aided many changes in technical development which, by the first decade of the present century, began to be apparent. The old catoptric or reflecting type of apparatus, so much admired in the seventies and eighties, began to be replaced by a more modern system which employed dioptric lenses, as well as reflectors, in the major occulting and quick flashing lights. These optical devices, largely developed by the great French engineer Augustin Fresnel, had been used for many years in European lighthouses, but they were expensive and only now was the introduction of sophisticated equipment changing the old idea that we employ only ". . . simple and easily managed apparatus."
One of the more interesting pieces of equipment was the diaphone. At about this time, the old steam foghorn with its heavy boiler and machinery, which had excited the interest of the Trinity House committee as they circled the Manicouagan light vessel, became out of date in favour of more efficient sound signal producers. The diaphone, a compressed air instrument still widely used, was invented in Canada, about 1903, by Professor J. P. Northey of Toronto University and, some time afterwards, it was adopted by the Department.
There were then many different types of sound signal under trial, and the electrically operated compressed air horn was none too successful at first:
"At Cape Croker, on Georgian Bay, an electric alarm was established in July 1902. This is the invention of a Canadian, and a similar alarm has been in use for some time in Victoria Harbour, B.C. where the city current is used. At Cape Croker, the plant has failed to give satisfaction, the sound produced being comparatively feeble."
From this inauspicious beginning came the diaphone, with its distinctive descending note or "grunt" at the end of each blast, familiar to vacationers at the coast. In this specialized technical field, unknown to the general public but of importance to seafarers, the invention of Northey's diaphone should be remembered, with the original steam foghorn of Robert Foulis, as a Canadian contribution to the science of marine aids to navigation. Both were invented at a period when Canada was not yet an industrial nation, although blessed with some enterprising scientific and technical minds.
In the days before radar and electronic technology, fog was a far greater hazard to shipping than it is today, and men were constantly at work to find some device, almost certainly acoustical, which would reduce the hazard. Lightships, by definition the focal point for marine traffic, were particularly suitable for sound signals as they were usually clear of the echoes of the land. While the diaphone formed an efficient sound signal in the air, scientists were groping for an underwater method of signalling. The use of acoustical devices operated indirectly by the sea, such as bell or whistle buoys, had been in common use for many years when, in 1905, the Department became interested in submarine signalling.
The submarine signalling bell was an American invention which had been installed, with some success, in the Boston lightship and other places. It had been satisfactorily reported on by the Commissioner of Lights, Mr. J. F. Fraser, and by the Commander of the Marine Service, O. G. V. Spain, who reported:
"I personally heard in the chart room . . . the lightships submarine bell at a distance of six miles. It was perfectly audible and I had no difficulty whatever in locating the position from the ship at that distance."
These enthusiastic testimonials were perhaps natural in an age when simple scientific experiments were still considered marvellous, and the possibility of accurate position finding by electronic means would have been considered sheer magic, even if it could have been envisaged. The device was fitted in a number of light vessels and other stations in Canada, and some ships were supplied with receiving apparatus, without which the transmitter was relatively useless. Groping uncertainly off the fog-bound coast of Canada, traffic made some hesitant use of the submarine signalling bell. Not until the era of radio direction finding and radar would anything substantially better be achieved.
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