The NLB was formed by an
act of Parliament, the '
(26 Geo. 3. c. 101), as the Commissioners of Northern Light Houses', largely at the urging of the lawyer and politician
George Dempster ("Honest George"), to oversee the construction and operation of four Scottish lighthouses:
Kinnaird Head,
North Ronaldsay,
Scalpay and
Mull of Kintyre, for which they were empowered to borrow up to £1,200 (). Until then, the only major lighthouse in Scotland was the coal
brazier mounted on the
Isle of May in the
Firth of Forth, together with some smaller lights in the Firths of the
Tay and
Clyde. None of the major passages around Scotland, which led through dangerous narrows, were marked. The commissioners, whose first president was the
Lord Provost of Edinburgh,
Sir James Hunter-Blair, advertised for building estimates, but there were no takers. They received an offer of help from Ezekiel Walker of
King's Lynn, who had developed a
parabolic reflector for the
Hunstanton Lighthouse, and sent
Thomas Smith, who was making his name in street lighting in Edinburgh and had offered help, to England to learn from him. Smith soon returned and instructed an Edinburgh architect to prepare the plans for four lighthouses. The £1,200 was spent before the first light at Kinnaird Head was finished, and a further act of Parliament, the '''''' (
28 Geo. 3. c. 25), was required which allowed them to start to receive half the lighthouse dues set to be levied on shipping, before all the lights were finished. By the end of 1787 the first light had been installed. At the Mull of Kintyre everything had to be transported by pack horse from
Campbeltown, 12 miles away, but it was lit by October 1788. To get to Scalpay in the
Outer Hebrides and North Ronaldsay in the
Orkney Isles needed boat trips across rough waters for Smith and Mills, the stonemason, but all the same the job was completed by October 1789, to widespread praise. The
dues which had originally been set at two
shillings per ton of cargo in the 17th century, were now reduced to one penny per ton. The commissioners' most famous engineer was
Robert Stevenson, whose sons
David,
Alan, and
Thomas followed their father into the profession. The Stevenson dynasty built the majority of the northern lights, in some exceptionally challenging locations. Their lights were some of the engineering masterpieces of their time, notably those at
Bell Rock,
Skerryvore, and
Muckle Flugga. Between 1876 and 2005 the Northern Lighthouse Board also maintained
foghorns at a number of locations. The last (at Skerryvore) was sounded for the last time on 4 October 2005. ==Operations==