Sir John Knox Laughton (23 April 1830 – 14 September 1915) was a British naval historian and arguably the first to delineate the importance of the subject of Naval history as an independent field of study. Beginning his working life as a mathematically trained civilian instructor for the Royal Navy, he later became Professor of Modern History at King's College London and a co-founder of the Navy Records Society. A prolific writer of lives, he penned the biographies of more than 900 naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography.