Leland E. Cunningham

Leland Erskin Cunningham (February 19, 1904, in Wiscasset, Maine – May 31, 1989, in Richmond, California) 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 (BRL) 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. Cunningham was present at the June 1943 meeting at which J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, and Lt. Herman Goldstine proposed the construction of the ENIAC; the program was agreed upon the same day. Initial plans for the machine called for it to have a precision of 5 decimal digits, but Cunningham's input compelled the inventors to design it with a precision of 10 decimal digits.

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