Most notable was his invention of intermittent flashing lights – marking the lighthouse as the first to use red and white flashing lights – for which he received a gold medal from the King of the Netherlands. The first mention of Robert Stevenson in connection with the Northern Lighthouse Board was in 1794 when Engineer Thomas Smith, entrusted Robert with the Superintendence of the erection of Pentland Skerries Lighthouse. And even some sailors didn't want them - they were accustomed to short, dangerous lives, and trying to make sailing safer seemed like messing with God's plans. Reading this book I learned, once again, how incredibly creative and industrious our nineteenth century ancestors were.

Her first published book was The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), an account of the construction of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, and named one of the List Magazine's '100 Best Scottish Books of all time'. During his term in office as Engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board from 1808 until 1842, Robert Stevenson was responsible for engineering at least 15 major Lighthouses. Robert Louis Stevenson was the most famous of the Stevensons, but not by any means the most productive.Automation may have ended lighthouse keeping as a profession, but they all stand to this day, signalling out to sea, and the four pinnacles of engineering in this book shine as lasting examples of human endeavour, monuments to men working at the edges of civilisation, building against the odds, for, as per the NLB’s motto, the safety of all. Smith was in fact Stevenson’s stepfather as his own father Alan, had died in 1774, and his mother had remarried to Thomas Smith. For over one hundred and fifty years Robert Stevenson and his descendants designed most of Scotland’s Lighthouses.

Under his stepfather, Robert’s engineering skills rapidly advance, and he built some lighthouses while still serving his apprenticeship. Five minutes on google is enough to bring home just how isolated or jaw droppingly difficult building lighthouses in places like Muckle Flugga, Skerryvore or Bell rock truly were.His contribution to engineering is deemed to be so significant that he was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2016. an endearment (thank you, my little Muckle Flugga), and an exclamation (Muckle Flugga, it's hot today! During Stevenson’s term as ‘Engineer to the Board’, in 1808-1842, he was responsible for the building of at least 15 significant lighthouses, the most important of which was the Bell Rock Lighthouse, which, owing to its sophisticated engineering, was Stevenson’s magnum opus.