Requiem for the Foghorn

It sounds like an animal, don’t it,” says a character in a Ray Bradbury story about the foghorn in a lighthouse he and his mate are overseeing. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of 10 million years calling out to the deep. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

Starting in the early 1800s, ship captains began to rely on the baritone wails of foghorns to navigate along coastal areas often blanketed in fog. These horns were generally manually operated by a sound wave could traveland the more easily it could pass around barriers, such as rocks. Different tones and sequences were used to signal different things, and mariners had to be able to recognize them.