Prof William Barron Coutts FRSE (26 May 1885 – 16 December 1946) was a Scottish physicist specialising in military science.
He was born at the family home of Green Croft in Kinghorn, Fife on 26 May 1885, the son of Elizabeth Martin Barron and Robert Alexander Coutts, a bank accountant.
[2] In 1913 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, his proposers were Ralph Allan Sampson, John Brown Clark, Cargill Gilston Knott and James Robert Milne.
[3] In the First World War he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery[4] on 24 November 1915,[5] serving in Gibraltar in the role of coastal defence.
[6] During the war he had begun to specialise in trajectory paths, range-finding and optics and obtained a post as a senior lecturer at the Artillery College within the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich near London.