Flamborough Head actually has two lighthouses. The older one is a chalk tower built by Sir John Clayton in 1674, one of the oldest surviving complete lighthouses in England, made from the same chalk as the cliffs it stands on. It was never lit. The light source for which it was intended never came together financially, and the tower sat dark for 132 years until Wyatt's replacement opened a few hundred metres away. Clayton's tower survives, Grade II* listed, a strange chalk monument to an idea that did not quite work. Wyatt's lighthouse, the working one, cost 8,000 pounds to build and has flashed across the North Sea ever since.

George Robinson's challenge with the original 1806 light was the ruby glass. Coloured filters cut intensity, sometimes badly. To compensate, he made the two red-flashing panels of his revolving optic more than double the width of the white panels, with an azimuth width of 69.5 degrees, the widest lens panels of any lighthouse in the world at the time. Clockwork drove the rotation. At first the cycle ran one flash every two minutes, but the optic was later changed to flash every thirty seconds. The lighthouse was also the first Trinity House station to burn paraffin, switching from oil before the rest of the network caught up, and the success there pushed the Corporation to convert all its lamps.

In 1925 engineers raised the lantern to take a new fifteen-foot lens, a first-order revolving catadioptric optic with four asymmetrical panels that displayed four white flashes every fifteen seconds. The old 1806 apparatus was disassembled and shipped to the Bahamas, where it joined a programme of Caribbean lighthouse improvements. The light source was converted from oil to electricity in 1940, in the middle of the Second World War, when keeping the coast lit and the convoys oriented mattered urgently. The last keepers walked away on 8 May 1996, after the station was automated. In 2022 the revolving Fresnel lens was removed and replaced by a pair of static LED lanterns. Visible range was reduced from 24 nautical miles to 18.

Some way off from the lighthouse, closer to the cliff edge, a fog signal station went up in 1859. The first signal was an eighteen-pound gun, fired once every fifteen minutes when the weather closed in. The gunners lived in a cottage in the compound. In 1878 the cannon was replaced by explosive rockets discharged every ten minutes, fired to an altitude of six hundred feet, and from 1896 every five minutes. Later still the rockets were replaced by an electric siren sounded through paired Rayleigh trumpets on the engine-room roof, with compressed air supplied by Hornsby oil engines. In 1975 it went fully electric. In 2022 the signal was simplified to one long blast every ninety seconds. The decommissioned Fresnel lens sits in the visitor centre now, open for inspection.