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. From 1945 to 1946, Cunningham served on the BRL's Computations Committee at
Aberdeen Proving Grounds in
Maryland, a group established as part of the
Ballistics Research Laboratory to prepare the
ENIAC for utilization following its completion the Moore School; the other Computations Committee members were
Haskell Curry,
Derrick Henry Lehmer, and
Franz Alt. His duties included supervision of the laboratory's shop of
IBM punched card calculating equipment, which was busy calculating ballistics trajectories, and writing sample problem specifications for
benchmarking the ENIAC. In 1946, Cunningham followed Lehmer to
Berkeley where the latter was a professor, joining the Department of Astronomy at the
University of California, Berkeley (a department that had 10 members in 1964–1965), and at one point serving as the department's chair. With Lehmer, Cunningham planned the construction of the California Digital Computer (
CALDIC). Working with the
Leuschner Observatory in the 1950s and 1960s, Cunningham performed and published calculations of the orbits of
comets. In particular, he showed that
Comet Pereyra and
Comet Ikeya–Seki were
sungrazers similar to comets seen in 1668, 1843, 1880, and 1882. == Death and honors ==