Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet

Sir Andrew Noble, Bt KCB FRS
Sir Andrew Noble c. 1907
Born	13 September 1831 Greenock
Died	22 October 1915(1915-10-22) (aged 84)
Citizenship	Scottish
Fields	physics
Known for	ballistics
Notable awards	Royal Medal (1880) Albert Medal (1909)

Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet KCB FRS (13 September 1831 – 22 October 1915) was a Scottish physicist noted for his work on ballistics and gunnery.

Born at Greenock, he was educated at Edinburgh Academy and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1849, promoted captain in 1855 and became secretary of the Royal Artillery Institution. He was secretary of the British government select committee on the replacement of smooth-bore cannon with rifled artillery and carried out research on the subject. In 1859 he became Assistant-Inspector of Artillery and in 1860 a member of the Ordnance Select Committee and of the Committee on Explosives, remaining on the committee until it was dissolved in 1880.

In 1860 he joined Armstrong's armaments works in Elswick, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, first as joint manager and, from 1861, as a partner, where he continued research into artillery, in particular inventing ways of measuring breech pressures. In 1862 he invented the Electro-Mechanical Chronoscope to measure small time intervals between triggers inserted into a gun to determine the acceleration of projectiles as they travelled down the barrel, allowing him to assess the performance of different powders.