ABSTRACT
From its inception in the 1760s to 1832 the computations required for the Nautical Almanac had been undertaken by home-based human computers working across England. As a result of calls for reform from British Astronomersthe Nautical Almanac Office was created in 1832 to centralise the work in London. In 1922 the Nautical Almanac Office (NAO) moved into rooms located in the King Charles Building at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. On the most influential Superintendents of the Nautical Almanac while it was based at Greenwich was Leslie John Comrie.
This chapter provides some context about the organisation and computing techniques used at the NAO before Comrie joined the office and then goes on to describe how Comrie completely revolutionised the computing methods employed there. He installed a range of calculating and accounting machines and applied them to the table-making process, developing new numerical methods to make the best use of the characteristics of each machine. Through his work on machine computing methods at the NAO, his publications and involvement with other mathematical tablemaking projects, Comrie influenced a whole generation of mathematical tablemakers and scientific computers from his base at Greenwich.
