Leslie Comrie

Leslie John Comrie was a New Zealand born astronomer and a pioneer of mechanical computation. Born in Pukekohe in 1893, he studied chemistry at Auckland University College, lost his left leg to a shell in France in 1918 while serving with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and received a doctorate from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1923. At the Nautical Almanac Office of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he later became superintendent, he promoted punched card equipment for making tables and in 1928 became the first person to use it for scientific calculation, computing terms in the motion of the Moon. In 1937 he founded the Scientific Computing Service, the first private company for scientific computing. During the Second World War he led a team of thirty scientists on war calculations such as bombing tables. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950 and died that year.