TODAY is the 147th anniversary of the death of Maria Edgeworth, of the Co Longford town that bears her family's name. The relevance to Weather Eye of the authoress of Castle Rackrent and other lesser classics lies in the fact that she was related in a complex way to Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, of Navan, who devised the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force. Let me fill you in on the essential family details.
Martia was born in 1768, daughter of the first wife of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Edgeworth, however, was singularly unlucky with his wives and lost three in quick succession: in 1797 he took a fourth - Fanny Beaufort, sister of the future admiral. Then in 1838, to cement the bond between the tribes, Beau fort himself a widower, married Edgeworth's daughter, half sister of Maria. Obviously the families were close, which was why Edgeworth in 1803 asked Beaufort to help him with a project.
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: in this way, news of an invasion could reach the capital 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 back the scheme.
Francis Beaufort, then in his late 20s, was at home in Ireland waiting on a new assignment from the Navy. Edgeworth put him in charge of implementing what he called his tellograph, short for telelograph, 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 number 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 shortly afterwards abandoned.