Francis Beaufort
Irish hydrographer and naval officer (1774-1857)
Sir Francis Beaufort ( BOH-fərt; 27 May 1774 – 17 December 1857) was an Irish hydrographer and naval officer who created the Beaufort cipher and the Beaufort scale.
Early life
Francis Beaufort was descended from French Protestant Huguenots, who fled the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. His parents moved to Ireland from London. His father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, was a Protestant clergyman from Navan, County Meath, Ireland, and a member of the learned Royal Irish Academy. His mother Mary was the daughter and co-heiress of William Waller, of Allenstown House. Francis was born in Navan on 27 May 1774. He had an older brother, William Louis Beaufort and three sisters, Frances, Harriet, and Louisa. His father created and published a new map of Ireland in 1792. Francis grew up in Wales and Ireland until age fourteen. He left school and went to sea, but never stopped his education.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francis Beaufort” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.