A marvel as rich and moving as its subject’s sound

One evening in the 1850s, a widowed ship engineer called 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 in which tens and hundreds of people died 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 fog-bound land.

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

Allan recounts the subsequent story of Foulis’s invention, and of her own obsession with these machinedriven instruments with an engaging humour, meticulous research and a lightness of touch. This could have a been a pretentious book, and when analysing the appeal of the foghorn’s lonely bass notes, the book does occasionally drift into the rocks of introspection. But as an evocation of a time when much of the life of our isles depended on a close relationship with the sea and its dangers, however, it is a marvel, as rich and moving as its subject’s sound.

The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music Of The Coast

Jennifer Lucy Allan

White Rabbit Books €19.99 ★★★★★