but again thanks for inviting me i really appreciate the opportunity to come here to talk to you about my new book now this past summer was a very important milestone for the history of america's lighthouses as you may or may not know on september fourteenth it was  three hundredth anniversary of boston light the first lighthouse in the country and that at that time of course it was the colonies for three hundred years america's lighthouses have kept countless ships from wrecking saved untold lives and contributed mightily to the growth and prosperity of the nation and brilliant beacons tells the fascinating story of the soaring coastal sentinels and one of the questions that i'm asked most often is how do i come up with the ideas for my books usually i will go off and spend many months reading a ton of books going to libraries randomly taking books off the shelf trying to find some topic that excites me and then if i find something that i think is a good idea i share with my literary agent and if i can convince him then we pitch it to my longtime editor w w norton to see if he wants to offer a book contract and that seems like a very simple process it is anything but it's often an anguished process takes me quite a while to find book topics sometimes especially because i'm not trained as in a story and people call me in a story and which is fine because i tell stories about history but the last history class i took was a freshman in college and if i could go back and do it over again i would have taken more history classes but so if we convince that we have a good book topic and i pitch it to my editor  there's no guarantee that he will like it in fact he's turned down some of the book topics that i pitched but with brilliant beacon's the process was totally reversed i just finished a book called one america first met china and i was flailing around looking for a book topic when my editor wrote an email to my agent saying that he just had lunch with the head of sales at norton and they wanted to know if i was interested in writing a book on lighthouses i said interesting but i had no idea because i knew nothing about lighthouses at all in fact it only seem to lighthouses my home life closer then about two hundred feet and so i asked for about a month to think it over i went to the library i read a bunch of books on lighthouses and i was absolutely floored i had no idea that light houses were so fascinating or that you could weave a story of the american experience using lighthouses as a topic far from being just a story about lighthouses it's a story about colonial commerce nation building war technological innovation engineering feats disasters tragedy inspiring determination poetry art and hope and that was just going to be one chapter so i knew was going to be a good book so i said yes i wrote the proposal and they accepted it and that's when i started to write the book and just what you know every single book i've written with except for one maybe i knew almost nothing about the topic before i started and the reason for that is it takes me about two years to write a book eighteen to twenty four months and i don't want to get bored and so if i think a topic i don't know a lot about then it's like getting a mini masters degree every two years and all keep me excited because i'm always getting surprised but what i'm learning hopefully along with the reader as well that give you a better idea of why i found this topic so exciting shores embracing the founding of the nation and it's a dramatic expansion across the continent when the nagual federal congress convened in seventeen eighty nine one of the first issues it took up was whether the federal government or the states would be in charge of lighthouses and one of its earliest acts congress made lighthouses a federal concern from that point forward as the country grew so too did the number of lighthouses creating a necklace of beacons and literally lighting the way for the settlement of new territories and states brilliant begins is also a history of government ineptitude international competition for a long time america's lighthouses are vastly inferior to those of great britain and france even though many stubborn and misguided american officials refused to concede that fact only by emulating its cross ocean rivals was america able to elevate lighthouse system from one mired in mediocrity to one that was among the best in the world the book is likewise a history of lighting innovation lighthouse the luminance change dramatically over time running the gamut from whale lard and vegetable oil to kerosene settlin and finally electricity similarly crude lamps gave way to more sophisticated ones and reflectors that did a poor job of projecting the light were placed by lighthouse illumination for nell lenses which not only increase the intensity of the light but also became one of the most important and strikingly beautiful inventions of the nineteenth century not as striking as the cellphone most of these elegant lenses have since been supplanted by modern optics which are far less arresting to the eye yet still effective in casting rafah beams toward the horizon light houses and underground substantial structural changes while early towers are made of wood or rubble stone in later years cut stone bricks iron steel reinforced concrete and even aluminum became the materials of choice this is the last major lighthouse built in the united states in one thousand nine hundred sixty two and it's unusual for two reasons it's the only lighthouse in the country to have an elevator it's also the only one with air conditioning now although all lighthouses require skill to build a few pose such significant challenges that they are truly marvels of engineering serving as testaments to human ingenuity america's military history is one in which lighthouses have played a crucial role they served as lookout towers in many conflicts but during the american revolution in the civil war they also became key strategic targets resulting in more than one hundred eighty of them being damaged or completely destroyed like wars natural disasters especially hurricanes have taken a terrible toll in lighthouses the great hurricane of one nine hundred thirty eight stands out both to the extent of devastation it wreaked and for the gripping and tragic stories of survival and death that left in its wake at its core however the dramatic history of america's lighthouses is about people and intriguingly diverse cast of compelling characters brings that history vivid life these include founding fathers skilful engineers imperiled mariners and intrepid soldiers as well as saboteurs penny pinching bureaucrats ruthless egg collectors and  you know they're ruthless to you and inspiring leaders undoubtedly the most important actors of the male and female keepers who often with the invaluable assistance of their families faithfully the lights shining and the fog signals blaring can you imagine what would be like to be in a room like that with that enormous fog thing going out that from eighteen seventy three a number of people who had to operate fog signals for extended periods lost a lot of their hearing on fortunately no one who has studied the history of these keepers could claim that their lives are proverbial picnic so they contended of loneliness monotony and a myriad of dangers not surprisingly a few died in the line of duty many keepers rescued people in distress on the water some performing solo rickly that america's highest award for life saving was bestowed on them above all keepers provided a vital public service that was at once noble and now thousand nine hundred saw the role of keepers the minish over time as light houses were decommissioned or became automated the number of keepers dwindled and today only boston light shown here still has one and if you have never visited boston light i highly recommend it during the summer months you can take a boat out there it's a wonderful day trip and they just did a multimillion dollar renovation so it's really worth seeing but as keepers faded from view and lighthouses began suffering from neglect nonprofit organizations government agencies and private individuals step forward to become the new stewards of an increasing number of lighthouses ensuring that they will be cared for and preserved for the benefit of future generations lighthouses are among the most beloved and romanticized structures in the american landscape is not difficult to find evidence of their hold on the public's imagination lighthouses  blazoned on postage stamps and license plates while legions of artists portray them on their campuses many cities and towns incorporate lighthouses into their official seals and even more businesses and organizations use lighthouses lighthouses as subjects plot elements or as dramatic settings and millions of people visit lighthouses every year the inherent beauty of lighthouses starkly etched against the sky is undeniably a big part of what makes them alluring but america's intrinsic fascination with lighthouses runs deeper than that over three centuries these brilliant beacons have indelibly woven themselves into the american fabric and it is this rich history more than anything else that draws us in now whenever you write a book it focuses your mind on whatever you're working on before i started working on this book i never thought about lighthouses once i began that's all i could think about although this is this not this is not our my front lawn but although i had driven from marble head to the north shore mall hundreds of times never before before i started working on this book had i noticed that about three or four  houses along the way have four to five foot tall wooden lighthouses on their lawns and two of them even had light bulbs in the lantern room is it the guiding people motorists home never never even recognized it before i also realize that some people don't like lighthouses i saw an ad for a large art competition in maine and they had a long list of submission requirements and the very first requirement or guideline said please no lighthouses now i lie and like lighthouse paintings i love paintings in general if they're well done here's kind of a wild painting done by jamie was the famous wyatt family it's called lighthouse dandelions and it depicts tennant harbor lighthouse overlooking penobscot bay in maine he uses it as a studio and also as a part time residents and i too have become one of those people  lighthouses and i even have a few lighthouse themed objects in my own house whenever i write a book after i'm done i try to buy something that reminds me of the book when i wrote leviathan the history of whaling in america i was naive enough to think that i would be able to buy some scrimshaw after the book was done the book did very well not quite that well because right as if to put a finger in my eye right after the book came out they made the all time record for a single piece of string shot in option three hundred twenty five thousand dollars so i bought a wooden spermwhale and i and i put it up over the front door of our house and it's still there to this day for billion begins i bought this this tile  it's about four inches by four inches or so and it was produced in one thousand nine hundred by the wage would company and sold in downtown boston it's called a calendar tile for reasons that now have become clear you would hang it you put a string through the hole and you'd hang it in your kitchen and you could tell you know time goes by the months and days of the year i actually got it my son asked me to go out to bring field i grew up my mom was an antique dealer i went to auctions all the time as a kid i love going to auctions place like this my son heard about bird field somebody told me a lot of comic books there so he said let's go so i went out and he bought a ton of comic books and i found this tile there so that's how it came into my being in my house and in addition to the touch i also have an old can of lighthouse cleanser that i bought at a yard sale in maine and when my wife got our calendar for two thousand and sixteen this book came out in april this past april of course she got a calendar that had lighthouses without telling me the last thing that i got and it will be the last lighthouse thing that ever goes in my house is this this is a door knocker that i found online which she told me it was there that i found online and we had to have our our mud room i don't know if you have mud rooms here but our mud room was infested by carpenter ants about a year and a half ago we had to rip it off the side of house and build a new one so this is a new door and i got this new knocker but that's it no more light house stuff now the most difficult thing about writing a book is deciding what stories to include almost any topic there are so many stories you can pick and with lighthouses it was particularly difficult because there are well over one thousand light houses built in the united states and each one of them has a story worth telling but i didn't want to write a book that was three thousand pages long which not even my mother would read so i had to make a lot of choices and i cut out a lot of stories and one of the ones i cut out i want to share with you today it had to do with the titanic asked the titanic was sunk by an iceberg in april of one hundred twelve people desperately wanted to figure out a way to keep such a disaster from ever occurring again so one concerned citizen wrote a letter to the commissioner of  houses with what he thought was a brilliant idea he encouraged the commissioner to place lighthouses on all large icebergs so as to warn ships before they hit them not a good it didn't work now to give you an idea of the great beauty of the lighthouses and some of them are absolutely phenomenally gorgeous in great locations i'm going to give you a tour of some of them that are in the book and also let you know every single picture you see here is in the book minus i think two or three i love pictures i like the stories that pictures help you tell in the book has about one hundred sixty images in it including a number that are in color now this is the portland head lighthouse in maine  of the most famous light houses over a million people are said to visit it every year and it's sort of like maine's motif number one i don't know how many vendor rockport in that little red shed the same same thing but it was originally built in seventeen ninety one maine was part of massachusetts and was a favorite spot for henry wadsworth longfellow the famous poet who grew up in portland he has to go down there and talk with the keepers and he actually is thought to have used this lighthouse as a inspiration for a number of his poems that feature lighthouse iconography one of them was called the lighthouse and i'm just going to read you the first stanza and think about this picture way alyson this the rocky ledge runs far into sea and on its outer point some miles away the lighthouse lifts its massive masonry a pillar of fire by night of cloud by day there's the board flats lighthouse it's at the mouth of the taunton river in massachusetts and believe it or not today it serves as a bed and breakfast but you have to bring your own breakfast this is one of the rooms that you can stay at if you go to this lighthouse really there are quite a few lighthouses you can stay at now it's really a new another unusual experience here's a courier knives print of the statue of liberty from eight hundred eighty five and one thing that i didn't know and maybe you didn't know is that the statue of liberty was not only intended to serve as a welcoming beacon for the weary of the world and the downtrodden of the world it was also meant to be an act of lighthouse and actually was an act of lighthouse for a couple of years but it didn't do a very good job and it was decommissioned in the war department took it over and here's the cape hatteras lighthouse which is often called america's lighthouse probably the most iconic in the nation is one hundred ninety three feet tall this is the third cape hatteras lighthouse it was built in eight hundred seventy and it contains one million and also erosion had been eating away at the beach and they didn't want the lighthouse to topple into the water took over a month to move it on those tracks they actually put soap on those tracks to make reduce friction and these hydraulics to move this along a little bit each day took about a month and a couple of days and cost twelve million dollars and when this book came out i did something i thought i had a good idea you may know before a book is published something called an advanced review copy is printed it's like a cheap paper bag version of your book to go out to potential reviewers so i asked for two copies and i sent them one each to the presidents of the two companies that worked in tandem to move this lighthouse in fact all the lighthouses moved in the united states which is about ten have been moved by these two companies so i thought if i send them a copy of my book they'll fall in love with a book in the buy copies for every single person in their companies which would have been hundreds of copies as far as i know that didn't happen but i did get two things back i got a letter from one of the presidents but the other one sent me a box a care package and in it was a wonderful shirt that has on it on the front a guy that looks like he's a cross between mr clean and the incredible hulk and he's holding in one arm cape hatteras lighthouse and the other hand he's dragging the block island southeast lighthouse which is also moved and it says expert lighthouse movers i've got to tell you that that t shirt is a great conversation starter i wore it two or three times this past summer when i gave talks out on cape cod i am not joking five or six people each time i wore that t shirt and walked down the street tapped me on the shoulder or said do you  and and i had because it says i'm part of the expert moving team and i had to let them down softly because no i just wrote about them but i think if i had moved them i would have gotten a free drink out of it because they just it's very great conversations there and there are two other things in this care package one was a baseball cap the other one was a bandana that had pirates on it and the reason i really stopped and looked at that i don't really wear bandanas but is at that moment and to this day i was writing a book on pirates so i thought that was an amazing coincidence because he had no idea that i was working on such a book now here's the st george reef lighthouse shown during construction it's about six miles off the coast of northern california it was finished in eighteen ninety two took ten years to build cost seven hundred fifty two thousand dollars the most ever spent on a lighthouse in the united states and here's not mine it's le lighthouse it was located about nine miles southeast of boston harbor about a mile off of cohasset massachusetts now there are actually two mine it's legit lighthouses this is the first one it was built and eight hundred forty nine and you  beneath the waves there's mine it's ledge down there which is there navigational hazard a ledge of uneven rock they built this iron pile lighthouse they drilled holes into the ledge put the legs into the into those holes cemented them in place this lighthouse lasted only two years before a nor'easter obliterated it killing the two keepers within and the night of the hurricane or the nor'easter one of the keepers wrote a note in which he said basically we're not going to make it until the morning this lighthouse is going to go over he put it in a bottle pitched it over the side and that indeed happened and that bottle was found by a gloucester fisherman a few days later and  the transcription of the letter but then seen the actual one i think the scituate circle society still has that but if you ever go to cohasset there's a wonderful memorial to the two lighthouse keepers that were killed and there's also a  what i'll show you the second land now when that lighthouse was blown over they still needed one of the structures part of the coast so what do they do they built this one which is a current mine its ledge lighthouse it's one hundred  fourteen feet tall those blocks of granite which come from quincy massachusetts way between two and five tons apiece so think about that they built this over three years it was in eighteen sixty they had no electricity no power tools it was a mile offshore in the rough atlantic and those group of men were able to build this amazing structure which is with the the pounding of the atlantic ever since and some of you might know that mine its ledge lighthouse is known as the i love you light has anybody ever heard that and that's because the characteristic flash that comes from this lighthouse goes one four three one flash for flashes three flashes which corresponds numerically to i love you although i can tell you as somebody who works for the federal government for ten years that the federal bureaucrat who came up with that flashing characteristic in one thousand nine hundred five did not have love on his mind when he did it some some later person saw it and gave it that denotation but this is just one of the this is it's just amazing how they put it's like a jigsaw puzzle this is mine its le the stone these are iron dowels that connect the different courses and then if you can see if you look down on the top these granite blocks or into did you take it like jigsaw puzzles and that's what gives it its amazing strength now here's the cape flattery lighthouse located on to show island in washington the most north westerly point in the contiguous united states in late eighteen hundreds one of the keepers here got depressed he flung himself off that cliff but he survived and the two other keepers went down and they gathered them up they brought him to the mainland they deposited him in a hospital and he was promptly fired by the lightho up in maine it was marshall point lighthouse in port clyde maine but it's famous because it was in a movie very famous movie life is like a box of chocolate forrest gump if you saw forrest gump you remember tom hanks who was farce gump at one point in the movie he runs back and forth across the country multiple times like a cult figure while the eastern terminus of his run was right there and if you ever go to marshall point lighthouse they have a wonderful little museum and they've got a scrapbook of photographs that show the two days that tom hanks in the film production team spent there filming tom hanks running up and down this it's amazing it only lasts like three seconds in the movie and they were there for two full days and here's the mock approved point lighthouse you can see in the top of that cliff so it's more than four hundred feet above the water fourteen tons it has one thousand one hundred eighty eight prisons and it is twelve feet high it's the only hyper this is the only hyper radiant lens in the united states and only a couple other ones were made throughout the world is still there to this day and here's a beautiful sunset at the michigan city east pier head lighthouse and i can tell you story half the time to tell the story people think that sort of funny half time you know get involved in retelling anyway the guy who took this picture i have to buy the rights to images of the not public domain fortunately a lot of the images in this book are public domain coastguard my whaling book i had to buy almost all the images from museums to get the images in my whaling book i had to shell out ten thousand dollars of my own money as part of my advance so if you want to help me out buy a copy the book but this this is when i had to buy the rights to this image is a professional photographer and after the book came out i sent him a  copy he wrote me an email he goes eric i got your book i really like it but i'm very surprised because he said when you asked for the rights to this image i thought that you were putting together a picture book or a guidebook of lighthouses i didn't realize you were writing a book book you know one that had a lot of words so at least i was pleasantly surprised now this is a stunning thirty second time exposure of the ludington north break with a lot of lighthouse in fact almost all lighthouses far as i can determine there is a ghost story associated with this one according to this story and there are many variations of it one of the variations that i heard was that there was a keeper named bernie who lived there and his wife cheated on him so he picture off the roof and killed her now the only problem is there never was a keeper their name journey and there is no record of their being a murder there but if you go to new london they will not let facts get in the way of a good stor there's one of my favorite pictures this is this is the michigan st joseph pier lighthouse in december of two thousand and twelve after a storm had kicked up waves twenty feet high on lake michigan turned a nice if you go on facebook or on the internet today do a search of great lakes lighthouses and ice you will see have already seen four or five articles this past winter where they always come out with these pictures because there are a bunch of lighthouses that get coated in ice and to me it looks like it's marble like it was carved out a marble stone maison now here's a lighthouse in my hometown it was not where i grew up it's where i live now my wife grew up there in marblehead massachusetts this is the original one was built one hundred thirty five was only twenty three feet tall and it's on something called marble head neck which is right next to marble head harbor and what was built to work great but about twenty or thirty years later and thousand eight hundred seventy s wealthy people predominately from boston started building what were then called summer cottages on marblehead neck which we would call mansions today and they were much taller than this lighthouse so they blocked it in local mariners because marblehead is still a real fishing community got upset and the government decided they had to do something first thing they did is they built that pole you see the pole in the background and about a hundred foot pole and every night they would raise two kerosene lanterns to the top of the pole and that was the lighthouse for a couple of years well they knew that wasn't going to work so they finally decided to build a hundred foot tall brick lighthouse in marblehead but at the last minute they decided to save money and instead of building a brick lighthouse they built this one an iron skeletal lighthouse which is very out of character for new england it's the only one like it in  england these are more traditionally built in the gulf coast and down off florida for reasons that you probably can easily figure out this construction design is perfect for waves rushing through and also when it provides less of a profile to nasty weather but we've got this one in marble head as i said it's the only one like it in new england half the people in town i'm convinced hate it the other half seem to love it i'm sort of noncommittal it's nice to beautiful little park if you're going to marblehead it's worth visiting now here's an image of the book this is the one that's most important to me of all the images in the book it's a painting about eighteen by twenty inches of  of town lighthouse on martha's vineyard and it was done by my daughter lily before she went off to college she and her grandmother who's a professional painter my mom was a painter too so i didn't get any painting talent but my sister and a lot of other people the family seemed to be good painters lily used to go into newbury street once a month once every few months with her grandmother and take a painting class and all day painting class as a bonding exercise grandmother to granddaughter and one day lily went in and she saw a postcard of this lighthouse and she painted it that day she brought it home she said dad this is for you do you know why i'm giving it to you i said because you love me she said now because i want you to finish this damn book because do working out or for more than a year you know my family would tell you a lot of stories about what it's like to live with a writer but anyway i did enjoy writing this book because there were a lot there were a lot of amazing stories in it and that's what makes writing fun to me at least that's probably why i decided you probably heard me abduction i have a ph d but i thought i was going to be a professor that's why i went to get a ph d but by the time i finished my ph d program i realize that i was not interested in writing the kinds of things i would have to write to get tenure at a good university which is where i want to be so i never applied for a teaching job at all now but that's the reason i said that is because i love the stories that i was working on when i was working on the cleanup of boston harbor i didn't like the political theorizing that i had to write about in fact my one of my advisors a guy named larry back out who used to be president of tufts university he said to me once after i had written a bunch of chapters and i was having a tough time a ph d he said eric you know you're really good writer why do you just quit the ph d program and become a writer and i remember looking at larry and saying larry the only thing more pathetic than a ph d student as a writer so i think so i finished my anyway here is that emily fisher one of the things i love about this book is there are a lot of women characters in it there are over one hundred nearly one hundred fifty female white house keepers between late seventeen hundreds in the early one thousand nine hundred said a time when it was very unusual for women to have any type of job or that's outside of the home and so this is amazing this story in particular because she came from an unusual background her name's emily fish and she was a lighthouse keeper for twenty one years at pointe peano's lighthouse in california but before she was a lighthouse keeper she was married to a guy name a lankton fish who is a very famous doctor in san francisco they used to have big parties at their mansion all the time he dropped out of a heart attack when he was sixty five she had a son in law who worked at the lighthouse organization and he said you know what there's a lighthouse keeper opening are you interested she said yes she got the job they called her the socialite keeper because all those parties that she used to have in san francisco she transferred the lights out her daughter also became a lighthouse keeper sometimes it runs in the family now there are entire chapters in the book about war about the american revolution and the civil war here's a picture of somebody i'm sure very familiar to you george washington greeting the continental soldiers on july third of seventeen seventy five and  lighthouses were very important during wartime for a number of reasons but george washington in particular during the american revolution he ordered the destruction of the boston lighthouse and the sandy hook lighthouse in new jersey and you might know that boston light was in fact blown up by the british on evacuation day when they left in seven hundred seventy six so the lighthouse that you see if you go to boston light is not the one from seventeen sixteen it's the one from seventeen eighty three when it was rebuilt now there's an entire chapter in the book on lighthouse heroes and the most famous of them is certainly i louis she was the lighthouse keeper at the lime rock lighthouse in newport rhode island which today is a yacht club the louis yacht club she was diminutive by five one five weighed barely one hundred pounds yet she is credited with saving eighteen people from drowning taking her little dory out and dragging them over the the vaca stern and bringing them to safety and she had at one time was probably one of the most famous women in the entire country in the summer of one thousand eight hundred sixty nine ten thousand people came to visit her they stole things from her keepers out because they want to have a piece of her the paparazzi wouldn't leave her alone she got a lot of marriage proposals that she was totally uninterested in and the problem was she was not somebody who loves celebrities limelight she hated it so finally they moved on and  she continued to work until she died nearly one thousand nine hundred and this is a sad story a story about this lighthouse this is a scotch cap lighthouse in alaska it's on unum back island which is the end of the aleutian chain you know mack island is known by the russians as the roof of hell because of all the volcanic activity but that's not what did in this lighthouse the early morning hours of april first one nine hundred forty six a very bad april fool's joke a hundred foot wall of water from a tsunami plowed into this lighthouse obliterated it and killed all five keepers within in the subsequent days all i found a kneecap and some intestines of those five guys ok since i brought you down and here's a more uplifting story this is a this is the flying santa and this is a great i love this program it started hundred twenty nine a pilot named bill when capozzi used to flatter rockland maine and he's to save people would see or deliver things up and down the coast he had been helped many a time in bad weather get back to the airstrip by the lights from the lighthouses along the main coast so he decided he wanted to do something to say thank you to all those brave lighthouse keepers who helped him stay alive so on christmas of one hundred twenty nine right before right after the crash he got his plane and he dropped presence on a couple of lighthouses around rockland as a thank you this program grew over time and at one point they were delivering presents to something like three hundred lighthouses a year during the christmas time and you probably know edward rowe snow or maybe you've heard of them he was the flying santa for decades i would love to have met that guy i met his daughter i read a number of his books he just seemed like a raconteur and i mean somebody you'd love to have a beer with as great stories and he wrote about fifty books but he was the flying santa and he funded a lot of the program out of his own pocket pocket and he was only a high school teacher in winter but if i remember correctly great story i just love the story now another favorite story in the book has to do with the invention of the final lens which is one of the technological marvels of the eighteen hundreds and they were also called glass beehives because of the way that they looked this is a lantern a washroom or a lighthouse in a first order or the largest coastal lighthouse and you can see the the lantern room and beneath is this is the device well this is where the lighthouse keeper would sit at night and sort of keep an eye on light but this device can't really see it very well but this is a crank and there's a way to go there's the  weight goes all the way that basically is like a pendulum that weight goes down slowly over time and it's that weight that rotates this incredibly heavy lens throughout the night so the lighthouse keeper had to go down a couple of times a night and wind up the the weight now for now lenses were named after this guy frenchman augustan gene for now a great genius and unfortunately somebody died very young at thirty eight of tuberculosis  time was the leading cause of death in europe now in addition to these there are hundreds of other stories in this book to take you on a reading adventure that spans about three hundred years and all my books recently have spanned about three centuries th this pirate book i'm working on now spans about a century and i'm hoping someday to write a book that spans a year maybe five years or one person i tend to be known for these epic stories but i'm going to try to narrow it in the future now one of the most exciting chapters in the history of america's lighthouses is being written right now and its roots reach back to the mid one thousand nine hundred when america's lighthouses were going through a period of great change many lighthouses that were no longer needed for navigational purposes on account of advances in short range and long range radar were decommissioned other lighthouses were automated meaning that they no longer needed a huge mission the coast guard had a limited budget and limited staff or manpower or human power so they were facing a problem their goal was to maintain navigational stability in the nation's waterways so they focused all their attention on the quality of the light or the fog signal if it was if there was one they put less effort and money into maintaining the towers and the buildings associated with the lighthouse and those started to fall into disrepair and just at a time when lighthouses were really crumbling and most in jeopardy help arrived starting in the mid one nine hundred sixty s and continuing up through the present a greater array of nonprofit and government agencies that concerned about the fate of lighthouses have stepped forward to take action to preserve them this is the east brother lighthouse out in california near san francisco is originally built and eight hundred seventy one is located on an island and today it is also a bed and breakfast and i've never been there but i've been told that if you get a room there they will pick you up on a boat they will take you to the island though give you champagne the put chocolate on your pillows they give you a tour of the  lighthouse and you can have all of this for between four hundred twenty five and four hundred seventy five dollars a night i told that story out in california in san francisco when i gave a talk and there's a guy in the front row and he raised his hand very excitedly and he said in two thousand the federal government got very involved in lighthouse preservation with the passage of the national historic lighthouse preservation act and essentially what this act does is any lighthouse that the coast guard no longer needs especially the structures they may still need light to be operational but if they don't need the structures they will transfer them for free to a nonprofit or a government agency that promises to take care of them and if nobody steps forward to take that they will auction off the lighthouse to the public and you probably heard about some of these auctions since this program began more nearly eighty lighthouses have been transferred to nonprofit and government organizations and nearly fifty lighthouses have been sold the prices paid by individuals at these auctions has varied wildly widely the cheapest lighthouse sold  far is not this one is on lake erie of cleveland harbor east breakwater lighthouse it's over ten thousand dollars that may sound like a bargain but just remember the purchase price is just the beginning of your costs this lighthouse which is out the on the mouth of boston harbor if you take a left and you go towards gray's light was purchased a few years ago by a couple lives in brookline the waller family great people for nine hundred thirty four thousand dollars at the most spent to date they have done a wonderful job renovating this lighthouse they've scrubbed the outside they've cleaned the inside they even hired furniture makers that made furniture with rounded backs to maximize the usage of the space within it's really they're doing a wonderful job now it is a great time to learn more about lighthouses and now that it's starting to get warmer maybe not today but soon it's a good time to visit them of the nearly seven hundred lighthouses still standing about half of them can be visited in one form or another many of them you can climb the towers some of them have museums you can visit as well three centuries lighthouses of illuminated america's shores they and their dependable keepers have done a wonderful job protecting mariners the ships their cargoes and passengers the success and growth of the economy could not have been achieved without the service that these lighthouses and lighthouse keepers have provided therefore i think it's very appropriate that now after all of these years of serving us we're stepping up more and more to serve these lighthouses to maintain them for future generations now before i finish up on to tell you a couple of stories as you time selling books i signed books i've signed some strange things in my books over time but one of the strangest occurred with this book i was giving a talk at the stanford yacht club actually grew up in stanford but when i was a kid my folks folks didn't have a boat i never went to the club so finally i get invited this gorgeous yacht club and after the talk a woman comes up and she's laughing already she hands me my book she goes i want you to sign it great what do you want me to say this is what she said dearest elaine you mean the world to me and i couldn't have written this book without you love eric so i said i said ok there was a bookseller sitting next to me who is selling my book i said should i write that she says i don't know it's your book so i wrote it and later on that night i'll tell you when i told my wife that story she was not amused but wonder where that book's going to show up someday anyway another story which i like even more is i love speaking to kids and i want to cohasset and over a period of two days i gave four talks to kids between the ages of first grade to high school and i would this one talk i was giving to this elementary school there are four hundred kids sitting in front of me third the fifth graders after the after the talks over this little girl comes up third grader and in mind that there are about one hundred people standing around she goes i want your books i said one's been donated to your library you can read it there is no no i want to buy one of your books i said well it costs a fair amount of money and everybody always asked me this point why don't you just give it to her i couldn't give out one hundred free books you know i'm a nonprofit organization myself so i said to her it costs you know she goes oh i've got two dollars in my pocket i said it cost a bit more than that she goes how about i give you two dollars now and i'll give you the rest when i'm  tear teacher standing right next to me that looks like this is all the time with this girl and that was in it and i started i was laughing and she and she goes i said sorry can't do that she takes one of my business cards and she cans it to me she goes if i give you this we give me a discount i have no idea what this little girl is going to do when she grows up but i know she'll be a success so anyway that i'm done as i said i did bring books including my last