Leland Cunningham

Who was Leland Cunningham?

Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.

Cunningham began his career as an assistant to astronomer Fred Whipple at Harvard University. In this capacity, he became a driving force in using automated calculating methods for computing celestial orbits.

During World War II, Cunningham joined the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland, putting his expertise in number crunching toward the war effort. The computational needs of the BRL revolved around the compilation of artillery firing tables and bombing tables and employed a number of methods, human, analog, and digital; the backlog of computation jobs was so overwhelming that a satellite computation center was opened at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in Philadelphia, and improved methods of automated computation were sought.