Robert Frederick Foster

Robert Frederick Foster (1853-1945) was a memory training promoter and writer.

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 a memory skills. Foster resigned in April 1888, wishing not to be associated with Loisette’s unethical personal and business practices and accusing him of being a “humbug and a fraud”.

Foster subsequently joined William Joseph Ennever and others in a similar business venture, the Pelman School of Memory Training, a correspondence school based in Chicago and London. 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.