South Foreland Lighthouse is a Victorian lighthouse on the South Foreland in St. Margaret's Bay near Dover in Kent. It used to warn ships approaching the nearby Goodwin Sands, but went out of service in 1988 and is currently owned by the National Trust.
A lighthouse had previously stood on the site since at least 1730, and during most of this time it was manned by the Knott family (lighthouse keepers).
South Foreland was the first lighthouse to use an electric light. By 1875 the lighthouse was using carbon arc lamps powered by a steam driven magneto.[1]
It was used by Guglielmo Marconi during his work on radio waves, receiving the first ship-to-shore message from the East Goodwin lightship, the first ship-to-shore distress message (when a steamship ran into the same lightship, and the lighthouse relayed the message up the coast to the Walmer lifeboat), and the first international transmission (from Wimereux, France, in 1899).
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