Fresnel Lenses

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: November 6, 2016.

If you're unlucky enough to be caught in a storm at sea, there's nothing more reassuring than the friendly wink from a nearby lighthouse. But have you ever stopped to think how that light can travel so far across the ocean? It's largely down to lenses—amazing, curved, Fresnel lenses (pronounced "Fre-nel," with a silent "s") that concentrate light into a super-powerful beam. Let's take a closer look at how they work!

Photo: If you see a light shining through a piece of glass or plastic with this weird pattern of concentric circles on its surface, you can be sure you're looking at a Fresnel lens.

How does a lighthouse work?

A lighthouse uses similar science to a telescope, but works in exactly the opposite way—with the help of a Fresnel lens. The glass lenses in a telescope refract (bend) light rays from distant objects so they seem to be much nearer. But in a lighthouse, the Fresnel lens wrapped around the lamp concentrates the light rays into a powerful and parallel beam so people can see it, with just a naked eye, as far as 30 km (about 20 miles) away or more!

Three cunning tricks make this possible:

1. Lighthouses use amazingly powerful xenon lamps (a little bit like neon lamps) that are hundreds of thousands of times brighter than the lamps in your home.
2. They mount their lamps in towers high above the sea level, which makes them visible roughly five times further away.
3. They use specially shaped lenses and prisms to concentrate their light into a super-powerful beam.

In theory, you could make a lighthouse beam with just an ordinary glass lens, but it would need to be enormous and heavy and that would make it incredibly expensive and quite impractical. That's why lighthouses use hollow, lightweight Fresnel lenses, which have a very distinctive "stepped" surface that bends the light as much as a thick, heavy glass lens. They're named for Augustin-Jean Fresnel, (1788–1827), the French physicist who pioneered them in the early 19th century. Car headlamps use Fresnel lenses molded from plastic in much the same way.

Look closely at a lighthouse and you'll see the Fresnel lens surrounding the lamp. The concentric rings are actually "steps" (thick ridges) in the lens surface. Each step bends the light slightly more than the one beneath it, so the light rays all emerge in a perfect, parallel beam that travels many kilometers/miles across the ocean.

The lamp in this particular lighthouse rotates so it sweeps across a much greater area of the sea. The rotation also means the light seems to flash every 10 seconds when you're far away from it. That makes the lamp much more noticeable and, because different lighthouses flash at different rates, sailors can time the flashes to figure out which lighthouse they're looking at and where they are.

Photos: The Fresnel lens at Anvil Point lighthouse near Swanage in Dorset, England, which was originally built in 1881 and fully automated over a century later in 1991.

It's hard to get close enough to the Fresnel lens in a lighthouse to see exactly what it's like, but if you're near a science museum you might just be lucky—they sometimes have old Fresnel lenses on show. Here are some photos I took of the working Fresnel lens at Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England. Note how there is a Fresnel lens on each side of the lamp (making eight in total) with prisms (curved chunks of glass) mounted above and below the lens to pull in light rays that deviate further from the central axis, making an even brighter beam.

Photos: The Fresnel lens exhibit at Think Tank, the science museum in Birmingham, England. The silvery thing at the bottom is the electric turntable that makes the whole lamp and lens assembly rotate very slowly.

Glass or plastic?

Photo: Car headlamps often use inexpensive, plastic Fresnel lenses to throw light off into the distance. Although plastic Fresnel lenses are cruder and produce poorer quality images than traditional glass lenses, it doesn't matter in this case: all that's important is concentrating light into a beam at a reasonably well focused point on the road ahead.

Fresnel lenses are all about making big, powerful beams of light that stretch very long distances. Unlike the conventional lenses in something like a telescope, the optical quality of the light beam emerging from a Fresnel lens often doesn't matter very much: if you're operating a lighthouse, all you're trying to do is throw light off into the distance; it's not important if sailors see a "blurred" image of the lighthouse... as long as they can see something! That means Fresnel lenses can be made from relatively inexpensive plastic, such as acrylic or polycarbonate, as well as glass. You simply need a mold containing the lens pattern in reverse—and then you can make as many identical Fresnel lenses as you want! Plastic Fresnel lenses are smaller, thinner, weigh less, and cost less than comparable glass lenses.

If you want to use a Fresnel lens the other way—to collect light rays from a distance and bring them into a sharply focused image—you need to be more precise. Inexpensively made Fresnel lenses make poorer quality images than traditional glass lenses because of a problem called spherical aberration: light rays traveling through a Fresnel lens at different angles will come to a focus at slightly different points, giving a blurred image. You get quite a bit of distortion because the surface of a Fresnel lens is discontinuous: unlike with a smoothly curving lens, there are sudden jumps from one segment of a Fresnel lens to the next. You'll probably also find that different colors are refracted by the lens to different degrees, giving you unwanted color fringes in your image (a problem called chromatic aberration). Although it's possible to adjust the angle of the steps in a Fresnel lens to minimize aberrations, generally you'd use a conventional lens (probably made from optical quality glass) for higher optical performance.

Artwork: Lighthouses and car headlamps aren't the only places where you'll find Fresnel lenses. Projection TV systems sometimes use them to make large, magnified images. In this 1980s design by RCA, an image generator (green, 102, maybe a traditional CRT or LCD screen), fires its picture onto a back-projection screen via a prism and mirrors (blue, 103/104), through a compound Fresnel lens (red, 10) and focusing lens (9, pink). Artwork from US Patent 4,482,206: Rear projection television screen having a multi-surface Fresnel lens by Bertram VanBreemen, RCA, November 13, 1984, courtesy US Patent and Trademark Office.

Find out more

On this site

• Lenses
• Light

On other sites

• The Fresnel Lens: An excellent 5-minute video by Jonathan Hare of the Vega Science Trust, who explains with great (lens-like!) clarity why lighthouses need lenses and why Fresnel lenses do the job best.
• How to make a Fresnel lens: Steven Dufresne explains the basic theory of Fresnel lenses and shows where you can find your own.
• Augustin Fresnel: Biography: A brief account of Fresnel's life and his research into how light waves behave.

News

• A lighthouse keeper's tale: BBC News, 12 May 2010. Many people dream about the peaceful solitude of being a lighthouse keeper, but what's life like on a lighthouse in reality?
• 2 Old Lighthouses Compete for a Historic Lens by Michelle York. The New York Times, 26 December 2007. Original Fresnel lenses are much in demand!

Books

For older readers

• A Short Bright Flash: Augustin Fresnel and the Birth of the Modern Lighthouse by Theresa Levitt. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. A detailed account of how Fresnel's theoretical understanding of light found brilliant practical application in the lighthouse.

For younger readers

• DK Eyewitness: Light by David Burnie. Dorling Kindersley, 1998. A good introduction to the history of light science from the excellent DK Eyewitness series. Ages 9–12.