I visited the aquarium yesterday, and I was really perplexed by the giant pair of black tubes sticking out of the side of the building. They almost looked like an oversized set of binoculars, and I wonder if the aquarists ever peer through the pipes like periscopes to keep an eye out for intruders
@ZooElephantsMan lol! I assumed they were for cannons or something, didn't really think about it. The beaches in Delaware have a lot of that sort of thing, since they're the entrance to the Delaware Bay / Delaware River (protecting Philadelphia, basically).
@ZooElephantsMan They ARE fog horns! Fog Signal Building Historical Marker
Which explains why old photos of the location don't have them, because they used different types of horns:
Fog Signal: 1st-class Daboll Fog-Trumpet (1878)
10 inch Steam Whistle (1894)
2nd-class Compressed Air Siren (1900)
1st-class Compressed Air Siren (1912) (1952)
Horn (1980)
(Beavertail Lighthouse - Rhode Island)
@TinoPup Wow! I was just kind of guessing earlier, and didn't expect my fog-horn idea to actually be true!
I just did some more research into it, and it seems like they were once used to alert passing ships audibly when the visibility of the lighthouse was obscured. It seems like these are replicas though, only for historic purposes.
@ZooElephantsMan Yeah, fog horns makes total sense for when the light was hard to see. I looked at a few other photos of fog horns and the styles differ wildly.
