De Scheveningen Lighthouse is a lighthouse in Scheveningen, Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

. It was designed by Quirinus Harder

Quirinus Harder

Quirinus Harder was a Dutch architect best known for having designed a large number of lighthouses. He worked as a structural engineer for the Loodswezen, the Dutch organization overseeing all maritime pilots...

 and activated finished in 1875.

History

In de 16th century Scheveningen had a lighthouse already, and the church collected money from the ships using it. It was elevated in 1850, and equipped with a copper cupola and a new light. In the 1870s, Dutch lighthouse designer Quirinus Harder got the assignment for a new lighthouse.

The lighthouse is made of cast iron

Cast iron

Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...

 and consists of nine segments. At the foot of the tower is one house for the supervisor and four more for the lighthouse keeper. The original light rotated in a mercury bath

Mercury (element)

Mercury is a chemical element with the symbol Hg and atomic number 80. It is also known as quicksilver or hydrargyrum...

, which was replaced in the 1960s by an electrical system.