Guideposts that 

 bring ships home 



When the men who venture to sea get 

 into trouble, the Coast Guard goes out 

 and brings them in. But even when ships 

 are not in distress, the Coast Guard brings 

 them in — guiding them past rocks and 

 shoals, through darkness and fog until 

 they are at last safe in port. This is done 

 by means of navigational aids — light- 

 houses, lightships, buoys, fog signals, 

 radio beacons — which the Coast Guard 

 maintains. There are over 39,000 aids. 

 About two-thirds of them are buoys. More 

 than 500 of them are fully manned light- 

 houses. 



The first lighthouse in America was 

 built in 1716 on the site of the latter-day 

 Boston Light. Before that only bonfires 

 or blazing barrels of pitch on headlands 

 guided ships to port at night. Shipwreck- 

 ers would duplicate the crude beacons on 

 lonely stretches of coast to lure ships onto 

 the beach where they could be looted. 



Boston also had one of America's 

 earliest fog signals, a loud cannon which 

 started booming in 1719. The first buoys 

 had appeared in the Delaware River by 

 1767. The earliest lightship station was 

 that at Craney Island in Hampton Roads, 

 Va., where a decked over small boat 

 was moored in 1820. The first outside 

 lightship was stationed off Sandy Hook 

 in 1824. 



In Colonial times, aids to navigation 

 were built and maintained by the various 

 localities. The Sandy Hook Light, for ex- 

 ample, was built with the proceeds from a 

 lottery and maintained by a tax on vessels 



Setting a large radio beacon buoy into 

 position. 



entering New York harbor. The responsi- 

 bility for aids was taken over by the Fed- 

 eral Government in 1789, when the Light- 

 house Service was established in the Trea- 

 sury Department. The Service was under 

 Treasury's Revenue Marine Bureau 

 (1845-52) and its Lighthouse Board 

 (1852-1910), which passed to Commerce 

 in 1903. The Service was a Commerce 

 bureau (1910-39) until returned to Trea- 

 sury and the Coast Guard. 



The tallest light in service is the 191- 

 foot Cape Charles, Va., tower. The Cape 



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