[5] R. F. Foster was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 31, 1853, the son of Alexander Frederick and Mary E. Macbrair,[1] and "connected with some of the best families in Great Britain".
[7] He emigrated to the United States (probably in 1872)[a] where he engaged in surveying and gold prospecting[4] and then in manufacturing before turning to the memory training and writing businesses in 1893.
[4] The treatise Foster's Complete Hoyle: An Encyclopedia of All the Indoor Games Played at the Present Day, first published in 1897, has been called his great achievement.
[2][3] Foster left employment at one of the largest manufacturing houses in Baltimore to become the business manager for "Professor Alphonse Loisette" (later identified as Marcus Dwight Larrowe), a lecturer and promoter of systems and methods to develop and improve memory skills.
[10] He delivered lectures and wrote training materials, most notably The Secret of Certainty in Recollection, plainly stated, simply taught: The Pelman–Foster System, a book of five correspondence lessons dating from around 1905.