To the lighthouse diaries
Ellen McCallie's diary about the challenge for the To the Lighthouse programme, from the BBC/OU series Rough Science 5
A lighthouse. Wow, this is hard to imagine. What’s it going to look like? I think of lighthouses as huge, made of brick or stone. Ours has to be bright, yet portable. Hum…I better just move ahead with the light source.
Light source, basically something that burns brightly. Oil burns. The more of it we burn at a time, the brighter it will be. Plus, we can devise a way to use mirrors to direct and concentrate the light so it goes out to sea and not inland.
On Zanzibar, there are a lot of choices for oil - castor bean, various palms and nuts. Given the fact I’ve got to collect, extract and purify the oil in basically two days, I’m going to try coconut oil. Plus, coconuts are big and there are a lot of them around, so if we need tons of oil to keep the lighthouse going all night, it’s more likely to be possible…fingers crossed.
As it turns out, collecting the coconuts was great fun. Plenty were underneath a group of coconut palms, plus I got to climb some coconut trees. Climbing trees is one of my favourite pastimes.
With 50 plus coconuts, I started dehusking the coconuts, cracking them open, and then grating them using this really cool grater with a built-in bench to sit on. In homage to Tom Sawyer, within minutes a wonderful group of six volunteers sat down to join me. Instead of taking days, we turned 50 coconuts into grated pulp in a matter of hours.
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Content last updated: 26/01/2005
