Invention and Early Deployment
The design is named for Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the French civil engineer and physicist who developed it for the Commission des Phares in the 1820s. Fresnel was already known for the wave theory of light, and the lens was an applied consequence of that work rather than a lucky piece of tinkering. Earlier proposals for stepped lenses had been sketched by the Comte de Buffon and by Sir David Brewster, but Fresnel produced a manufacturable design and had it built.
The first installation was at the Cordouan light at the mouth of the Gironde estuary in 1823. Contemporary reports credited it with a dramatic increase in range over the parabolic reflectors then in use, because reflectors returned only the light that happened to strike them and absorbed a significant share of that.
Adoption was rapid but uneven. France and Britain re-equipped their major stations over the following decades. The United States, whose lighthouse administration was at the time notoriously parsimonious, persisted with inferior reflector systems for years, a lag that became a subject of congressional inquiry before the Lighthouse Board was reorganised in 1852.