Fournier d'Albe, Edmund Edward (1868–1933), physicist, inventor, and Celtic enthusiast, was born 25 October 1868 at 46 Hunter Street, Bloomsbury, London, son of Edward Hermann Fournier, student and later engineer, and his wife Ellen Maria (née Beauchamp), who was wealthy and was probably Irish; certainly her son claimed Irish ancestry. His father subsequently added ‘d'Albe’ to the family surname. Nothing is known of any siblings. He was educated at the Royal Gymnasium, Düsseldorf, and then studied inorganic chemistry and physics at the Royal College of Science, London, graduating in 1891 with a first-class Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) degree. The family moved to Ireland (1895), and lived at Prisma, Torca Hill, Dalkey, Co. Dublin. Fournier d'Albe developed an enthusiasm for the Irish language, spending several weeks on Tory Island, Co. Donegal, learning the language and collecting traditional songs.
He was secretary of the Celtic Association (established 1899), and founding editor (1901–6) of the Association's journal Celtia, which appeared until 1908. Fournier's visit in March 1899 to the Isle of Man was the impetus for the foundation of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh, a society dedicated to the preservation of the Manx language. He was employed for a short time by the Feis Ceoil Association, which had been established in 1897 by Annie Patterson (qv) and others to encourage Irish musical culture by running annual festivals. From 1899 he was the moving spirit behind efforts to establish closer cultural and linguistic links between the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, promoting what came to be called pan-Celticism. However, in a magazine article of late May 1899, Fournier d'Albe's non-Irish birth was criticised by Irish nationalist revivalists, and he had to resign from the post of registrar. Opposition did not appear to diminish his enthusiasm for the Irish language and for the wider Celtic connections; he organised the Pan-Celtic Congresses held in Dublin (1901), in Carnarvon (1904), and in Edinburgh (1907). The Celtic Association published (1903) Fournier d'Albe's pioneering English-Irish dictionary and phrasebook, with a second edition in 1905 and several reprints; James Joyce (qv) is known to have owned a copy. Fournier was particularly interested in placenames in Irish, and is credited with lobbying for the use on public signs of the Irish name Deilginis instead of Dalkey, apparently the first signs in Irish in modern times, and he prepared material on Dublin placenames for delegates to the Dublin meeting of the British Association in 1908. He requested that the catalogue and signs for a proposed 1906 Irish International Exhibition should appear in Irish as well as English.
Fournier d'Albe also actively promoted Esperanto, at that time growing rapidly in popularity and in apparent relevance in world communication. In 1908 he and a colleague, Robert Boyd White, published translations of an ancient Irish story from the manuscript Book of Lismore into modern Irish and Esperanto; it was the first Irish-Esperanto translation. He was involved with Esperanto and its international aspirations for the rest of his life; in 1926 he spoke in Esperanto on ‘Wireless telegraphy and television’ at the second international Esperanto Summer University held in Edinburgh.
By that date Fournier d'Albe was much more widely recognised for his important work in science than for his language activism, though it is possible to identify similar themes in all aspects of his thought. He held positions in the physics laboratories of Trinity College Dublin (TCD, where he worked with George Francis Fitzgerald (qv)), and of the Royal College of Science in Ireland, was an assistant lecturer in physics at Birmingham University (1910–14), and special lecturer in physics in the Punjab University, Lahore, India (1914–15). Interested in the electro-optical properties of selenium, he utilised them in a device which he called an optophone; it was patented in 1912, and he worked on improving it for the rest of his life. This was a pioneering attempt at optical character recognition; selenium detectors scanned lines of typescript and registered the changes in brightness of printed characters; varying electrical signals generated musical tones which could be recognised by trained operators. The only practical use of such a device at the time, before the invention of the electronic computer, was in helping blind people to read ordinary printed material, and it was widely welcomed though not very widely adopted; only a few blind people became expert. The device was exhibited at a meeting of the Royal Society in June 1914, and in Paris and Brussels in 1917; in 1933 a later model was on display in the Science Museum, London. On 24 May 1923, using wireless telephony, Fournier d'Albe transmitted the first wireless picture broadcast from London, a photograph of King George V; it took twenty-two minutes to become recognisable. His ‘acoustic spectroscope’, based on acoustic resonances and demonstrated to the Royal Society in June 1924, was described as ‘a step on the way to the photographic recording of speech’ (Times, 19 June 1924), and Fournier has had some recognition as a pioneer of television. He was awarded Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degrees by the universities of London and Birmingham, and was a fellow of the Institute of Physics, member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), and vice-president of the Radio Association.
He was also a prolific writer on scientific subjects, successfully explaining new technological and theoretical advances to the ordinary reader; his important work The electron theory, with a preface by George Johnstone Stoney (qv), first published in 1906, had several editions and was translated into four languages. He himself translated several scientific works by continental authors. He wrote The moon element: an introduction to the wonders of selenium (1924), and was one of the first scientists to comment on what would now be called the fractal nature of certain structures, in his book Two new worlds. The infra-world. The supra-world (1907). He speculated that the whole universe was a hierarchical fractal structure, and is also remembered in connection with Olbers's paradox, which asks why, in an infinite universe, with light travelling in straight lines, the interstellar regions and the night sky are dark. Fournier's suggestion, novel in 1907 and perhaps prefiguring the concept of dark matter, was that some of the infinite number of stars must be non-luminous.
At the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, Fournier was a believer in spiritualism, as were some other scientists of the day, notably Oliver Lodge and William Crookes. He wrote a biography of the latter (1923), and also produced works on spiritualism and a translation of von Schrenk Notzing's Phenomena of materialization; a contribution to the investigation of mediumistic teleplastics (1920). He was secretary of the Dublin branch of the Society for Psychical Research in 1908, and brought his scientific and linguistic skills to bear on an investigation in 1922 of a celebrated medium in Belfast. The Goligher family from the Ormeau Road, and especially Kathleen Goligher (b. 1898), had been studied intensively by William J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering in the Municipal Technical Institute, Belfast. After carrying out what he thought were rigorous scientific investigations, Crawford was convinced by the table-turning, apparitions, and mediumistic communications, and his three books on the subject were read worldwide. After Crawford's suicide on 30 July 1920, Fournier d'Albe was brought in as a sympathetic scientist to investigate the Belfast phenomena. He asked questions of the medium's spirit guide in German, French, and Irish, took measurements, and photographed ectoplasmic materialisations, but in The Goligher circle May to August 1921 (1922) stated that in his view the unfortunate Crawford had been duped by clever frauds.
Fournier d'Albe married (17 March 1906) Edith Consuelo Hitchcock (b. 1870), in the Church of Ireland church, Harold's Cross, Dublin; she was the aunt of the film director Rex Ingram (qv). The marriage was unhappy and the couple lived separately for many years. Fournier claimed that he had to resign from his post in Birmingham University after his wife taunted and ridiculed him in front of students, and that she broke windows in his house. Their difficulties became public knowledge in 1924 after Edith Fournier claimed that as she was passing her husband's flat in Maida Vale, north London, he had dragged her inside and beaten her with a stick until he drew blood. The resulting court case on 13 August 1924 was reported at length in the press, and Fournier was found guilty of assault.
Continuing his scientific work, Fournier lectured on the new technologies of television and radio; he had a stroke while lecturing, and suffered partial paralysis. Four years later he died in St Albans, Hertfordshire, on 29 June 1933, just a few days after being awarded a civil list pension. Though nothing certain is known of any descendants, an E. M. Fournier d'Albe was a pupil in St Albans school in 1937.
It is possible that the personality and career of E. E. Fournier d'Albe inspired the character of mad scientist, de Selby, in Flann O'Brien's (qv) surrealist novels The third policeman and The Dalkey archive. De Selby lived on a hill in Dalkey, shared some of Fournier d'Albe's metaphysical and scientific interests, and was the inventor of a device which collected sound and reproduced it as light, using a substance called ‘omnium’, which has strange effects on time. However, the inspiration for de Selby has also been attributed to the inventor Walter Conan (qv).
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).