Edward Bertram Pinniger FRES (12 April 1913 â 18 August 2005) was a British recording engineer and amateur entomologist. In 1946, he and Cynthia Longfield of the Natural History Museum were the first to identify Coenagrion scitulum (the dainty damselfly) in Britain.
His 1946 survey of Neuroptera for The London Naturalist, was reprinted as The Neuroptera of the Home Counties. In it he identified 12 species of Neuroptera in central London.
He was a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and a member of the London Natural History Society (LNHS).
Edward Pinniger was born in St Pancras, London, on 12 April 1913. His mother's maiden name was Cook. In 1940 he married Leonora Forth in York.
Pinniger was a recording engineer at British Homophone when he supervised work on new recording techniques being developed by Cecil E. Watts whose wife Agnes had unsuccessfully attempted to record the sound of grasshoppers on disc. In 1952 he read a paper on "Processing and pressing of disk recordings" in Portsmouth. In 1971 he lectured on "Processing of gramophone records" and in 1977 contributed a chapter on disc manufacture to John Borwick's Sound Recording Practice: A handbook (Oxford University Press, c. 1977) compiled for the Association of Professional Recording Studios.
A keen entomologist, Pinniger was a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and a member of the London Natural History Society (LNHS). In 1946, he published a survey of Neuroptera for their journal The London Naturalist which was reprinted as The Neuroptera of the Home Counties. In it he identified 12 species of Neuroptera in central London but by 1981 five had yet to be found in Buckingham Palace garden, a reservoir of insect life in central London.
A resident of Chingford, on the border of Essex, he led LNHS expeditions in the county. On 21 July 1946, with Cynthia Longfield of the Natural History Museum, he was searching dykes near Benfleet in Essex for Lestes dryas when they were the first to detect Coenagrion scitulum (the dainty damselfly) in Britain. They first captured a male and then two females three quarters of a mile away. The species was subsequently determined by Longfield at the Natural History Museum.
Pinniger died in the district of Windsor and Maidenhead, England, on 18 August 2005.