Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who devised the famous Beaufort Scale of Wind Force, was born 225 years ago today, on May 27th, 1774, in Navan, Co Meath. He became in due course Hydrographer to the British Navy, and during his long tenure of that office, from 1829 to 1855, he transformed what was then little more than a depot for the storing of charts of mediocre quality into the finest maritime surveying and cartographic institution in the world.
But even as a young man, Beaufort was of a very practical disposition. In 1804, during a period of leave from the navy, he became involved in a strange scheme with his brother-in-law, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who was in turn father of the novelist, Maria Edgeworth.
Edgeworth was an eccentric and inventive man, and in the late 1790s he presented to the Royal Irish Academy a paper entitled "An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence".
His idea was to build a line of telegraphic stations across the country along which visual signals could be passed from Galway to Dublin; it was very similar to the device devised by Chappe in France a few years previously, which has been doubly immortalised by being mentioned in the Dumas novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, and by being described in Weather Eye about a week ago.
Edgeworth argued that his device would allow news of any invasion to reach the capital very quickly. After an attempted landing by the French in Bantry Bay in 1796, and a more successful venture during the '98 rebellion, the authorities became receptive, and agreed to fund the scheme. Edgeworth put Beaufort in charge of implementing what he called his "tellograph", short for "telellograph", meaning a device for sending words across a distance.
Each manned station was to consist of a tall tower on which four triangular pointers were mounted: eight possible positions of each pointer corresponded to the numbers 0 to 7, and the four pointers thus allowed several thousand "words" to be transmitted. A code-book provided the operators at either end of the chain with code and decode.
Beaufort organised the work with great enthusiasm, and by July 1804 the completed line of 30 stations extended from Dublin through Athlone to Galway.
But the designer had failed to take account of Irish weather: seldom was visibility sufficiently good for transmission on every segment of the chain, and the number of occasions when a message could be relayed right across the country turned out to be very few indeed.
Edgeworth's tellograph was never inaugurated into useful service, and was abandoned shortly afterwards.