François van Rysselberghe (24 August 1846 – 3 February 1893) was a Belgian scientist who was the forerunner or the inventor of numerous devices in the fields of meteorology and telephony.

[3] After completing his secondary studies before the age of 17 at the Sint-Barbaracollege,[4] he was forced to work to financially support his family and then accepted a post of supervisor of a boarding school, first in Ninove first and then in Tournai.

He then planned to invent a combined device that would automatically annotate weather data on a single metal cylinder.

The device was acquired by foreign meteorologists and was presented at the International Geographic Congress held in Paris in 1875, which earned it a gold medal and the academic palms.

[6] At this time, he also developed a tide gauge[7] but in 1876, Jean-Charles Houzeau, director of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, called on him to attach him to the weather forecast service.

François Van Rysselberghe then began to think about an automatic process for transmitting data in real time, which he called international telemeteorography (French: télémétéorographie internationale).

[9] Van Rysselberghe was always in search of the factors influencing the climatic conditions, and was then interested in the high layers of the atmosphere and planned to send there via a kite or a balloon a telemeteorograph.

These projects would only remain theoretical as his discoveries led Van Rysselberghe to tackle other related issues: long-distance telephony.

[10] In 1884, having donated his Van Rysselberghe System to Belgium, he was appointed, as a reward, electrician-consultant to the Ministry of Railways, Posts and Telegraphs.

[11][5] Shortly before his untimely death, Van Rysselberghe became interested in the transport of electricity made more difficult by the fact that the current at that time was direct.