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The Foghorn’s Lament:

Jennifer Lucy Allan White Rabbit Books £16.99

Richard Benson

One evening in the 1850s, ship engineer Robert Foulis was walking along the shore in his home town of St John, Canada. It was foggy, and Foulis’s mind was on the ships lost in the mists out at sea. In those days, shipwrecks were shockingly common, and the world’s greatest maritime minds were applied to improving coastal warning systems.

On that particular night, Foulis made a breakthrough when he heard his daughter playing the piano at home. The lower notes, he noticed, carried better through the fog than the higher ones. He applied this observation to a new machine that would use one low note to warn ships away from land.

The first of Foulis’s foghorns was installed off the St John coast in 1859, and the rest is a low, sonorous history.

Radio 3 presenter Julia Jennifer Allan recounts the story of Foulis’s invention and of her own obsession with them with humour, meticulous research and a lightness of touch. The subject may be obscure, but Allan rightly observes that the sound of the foghorn is bound up with Britain’s maritime history, and as an evocation of a time when much of the life of our isles depended on the sea, her book is as rich and moving as its subject’s sound.

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2021-06-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

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