He was born in
Three Anchor Bay,
Cape Town, the eldest of four children, and his father Clarence Wilfred Cousins was a senior civil servant who served for a time as Secretary of Labour. His grandfather on his mother's side was Sir
James Murray, first editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary, and Cousins attended Murray's funeral at the age of 11. Cousins' interest in Astronomy was aroused first by the sighting of
Halley's Comet in 1910 and then by a book on
Astronomy ("The Stars" by E.Hawkes) given to him in late 1914 - early 1915 during a family visit to
England. In 1915 the family moved to
Pretoria and Cousins was educated at
Pretoria Boys High School from 1917 to 1921. The appearance of
Nova Aquilae (a bright
nova occurring in the constellation
Aquila) in 1918 and a letter he received from the astronomer
A.W. Roberts in 1920 further encouraged his interest in Astronomy. In 1922 he attended the
University of the Witwatersrand on a
Barnato Scholarship to study mechanical and electrical engineering. After graduation in 1925, Cousins spent a year in
England at the
C.A. Parson Engineering works in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He then returned to South Africa and was employed at the
Electricity Supply Commission, where he worked for 20 years. Throughout his early career Cousins observed numerous
variable stars. In the 1940s the technique of using a
Fabry lens to obtain uniform stellar images for measurement, as used by E.G. Williams, became of great interest to Cousins, who then published his first list (with photovisual magnitude) of over 100 bright southern hemisphere stars in 1943, that he had observed at the
Durban observatory.
R. H. Stoy of the
Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, was impressed by Cousins' results as they were comparable to those obtained by professional astronomers. This led to a collaboration and in 1947 Cousins joined the staff of the Royal Observatory. Cousins singlemindedly devoted himself for the last 50 years of his life to
photometry and its improvement by application of the
photoelectric effect. In his early 1990s Cousins started to use a newly-available red-sensitive photomultiplier tube as part of a photometric system for information gathering on the energy distribution of red stars. This
UBV photometric system was based on one devised by
Gerald Kron and became known as the "Cousins system" (or sometimes the "Kron-Cousins system"). It allowed broadband, standardised fundamental measurements of
stellar flux from near-
ultraviolet to near-
infrared wavelengths. Another of his discoveries was the variability of
Gamma Doradus, which was later shown to be the prototype of a new class of variable star. == Awards and recognition ==