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Henry Winstanley is one of the unsung heroes of English history, an eccentric entrepreneur and engineer of 'wonders', an engraver, architect, shipping merchant, and chum of Charles II. He was also, as the first builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, ultimately a tragic hero. In 1695 two of his ships sank off the coast of Cornwall. It was a familiar event down in the west country: far out in the English Channel a jagged set of rocks called the Eddy-stone bedevilled sailors for generations, invisible at high tide, always deadly. Only one man had the audacity to attempt the building of a lighthouse on these isolated rocks, and that was the indignant Winstanley. No one had ever built a lighthouse on rocks in the open sea before. But, just five years after completing the lighthouse, the Great Storm of 1703 swept across Britain, as famously recorded by Daniel Defoe: the fiercest storm ever suffered by these isles. Winstanley was in his lighthouse at the time. By morning he, and his lighthouse, had disappeared without trace. Adam Hart-Davis here brings his infectious enthusiasm to the tale of another vibrant genius from his Local Heroes television series. Both the man and his context are lucidly presented, opening up the colourful world on the late seventeenth century, a combination of hard- headed business, innocent excitement in the possibilities of engineering and navigation, as well as architectural and scientific tenacity. (Kirkus UK)

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Adam Hart-Davis is a television presenter, radio panellist, writer and photographer. He is best-known for Local Heroes and has published three books on these with Sutton and more recently The book of Victorian Heroes. (2001)

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