Here's a job you've probably never heard of. A lampist is someone who specializes in the care of lighthouse lenses.
U.S. Coast Guard Certified Lampist Tom Cumella was on Nantucket this week lending his expertise to the Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, which has a lens that's due for a checkup. CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with him about to learn more.
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GG Tom, can you please just start by telling us, what is a lampist?
TC We used to go around and basically take care of all the illuminating apparatuses for the lighthouses. Each district had their own lampists, and they used to go once a year around to make sure that these lenses were in good care. Some of the bigger lenses are made up of hundreds of individual prisms and they can become loose during use. And that's what you don't want, because then they start falling out and you lose the focus of the lens. So the lampist basically maintained and cared for these, and then it was up to the lighthouse keeper to take care of those lenses. And if there were any issues, they would put in a request and the lampist would have to go back out and fix whatever issue there is. Today it's no different. Not a lot that are still in service. There are some and we still maintain them the same way.
GG Is a lampist a full time job? If so, I imagine there's a lot of travel involved?
TC Yeah, it's not a full-time job at this point. Way back when, yes, it was a full-time job. When the lampist wasn't traveling, they would work in the depots, putting the lenses together, making sure that they work and they were focused properly. But today, most of these lenses are not in service. They're in museums. So, no, it's not a full-time job. I actually had a 42-year career in the construction industry in New York City. I used my vacation time and the jobs I would do would last 12, 16 weeks. My mentors that trained me in this, they used to schedule their jobs around my time off.
And yes, we do a lot of traveling. We travel from the East Coast to the West Coast, from north to south. January 15, I'm leaving for the Falkland Islands. So, yeah, we travel all over the place to do this work.
GG What is a Fresnel lens and why are they sometimes called "the invention that saved a million ships?"
TC It's a phenomenal piece of machinery for the time that it was built, and basically they work on the premise of refraction and reflection. You can just tell by a regular light bulb, light is omnidirectional—it just goes all over the place. These lenses, they harnessed all that light that's going out all over the place and basically focused it into one straight beam that went straight out to the shipping channels, twenty-something miles out to sea. Some of them, as you come in, they call them hazard lights, and they would put a red beam on it. And that would tell the captains of these ships, hey, there's danger out there. There's shoals, there's reefs, sandbars. So, yeah, it did save a lot of ships, because it let everybody know what was going on out there.
GG Can you explain what you'll be doing with this particular lens at Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum?
TC The first thing we do is I walk around the lens and I look at all the characteristics of it. You start looking at the chips in the glass and you start looking for through-and-through breaks, which means the prisms themselves have breaks that go straight through. Those are things that absolutely have to be fixed. Then I'll start doing what they call an acoustic test. I'll start tapping on the prisms and you can actually hear a prism that's loose. It has a rattle. So I'll do that on every single prism. Prisms that are loose, those will get the attention first. We'll clean it. It's unbelievable the difference. After you clean them, they shine like a diamond. They really do.
GG Those were all the questions I had, but did you want to add anything else?
TC Being a lampist is a privilege. It's a mystique with these lenses. You're working on a piece of history that had a profound effect on commerce, not only in United States, all over the world. But the real thing that I still find amazing—I'm doing this 16 years now. I'm 62 years old. A lot of these lenses, like especially Martha's Vineyard, especially this one [Nantucket], they worked a lot longer than I'm alive. And some of these lenses, they're retired longer than I'm alive. So, when you start looking at it that way, and all the people that were involved in this lens, and it came from France and went into Staten Island—they put it on a ship and they took it where it had to go and it got reassembled back into whatever lighthouse it went to—it's just a privilege to work on these lenses.
