John Flavell Coales

CBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

, FRS (14 September 1907 – 6 June 1999) was a British physicist and engineer. He started the

Borehamwood Borehamwood (, historically also Boreham Wood) is a town in southern Hertfordshire, England, from Charing Cross. Borehamwood has a population of 31,074, and is within the London commuter belt. The town's film and TV studios are commonly known ...

laboratory of the Elliott Brothers company in 1946. Coales graduated in 1929 from Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge and joined the

British Admiralty The Admiralty was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for the command of the Royal Navy until 1964, historically under its titular head, the Lord High Admiral – one of the Great Officers of State. For much of it ...

, working in the experimental department of the Signal School, Portsmouth. He later worked on

radio direction finding Direction finding (DF), or radio direction finding (RDF), isin accordance with International Telecommunication Union (ITU)defined as radio location that uses the reception of radio waves to determine the direction in which a radio station ...

and centimeter-band

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

used for

naval gunnery Naval artillery is artillery mounted on a warship, originally used only for naval warfare and then subsequently used for shore bombardment and anti-aircraft roles. The term generally refers to tube-launched projectile-firing weapons and excludes ...

. In 1946 he was awarded the

OBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

for his wartime work on naval radar. That year he left the Admiralty and became director of the Elliot Brothers research laboratory. Coales made significant contributions to automatic process control, and was a pioneer in the use of digital computers for

real-time control Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constrai ...

. In 1957 he was a founder of the

International Federation of Automatic Control The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), founded in September 1957, is a multinational federation of 49 national member organizations (NMO), each one representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic c ...

. In 1970 he was made a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. He served as President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1971. In 1974 he was invested as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Coales married in 1936 and had two sons and two daughters.

References

British electronics engineers British physicists Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the Royal Society 1907 births 1999 deaths Alumni of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge Professors of engineering (Cambridge) {{UK-engineer-stub