As America stood on the brink of a
Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater,
spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution.
Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder
the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the
engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and
successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.
Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due,
but conspicuously
missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by
courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area
to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and
engineers of all races and genders to follow.
“These women were both ordinary and
they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines
light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. The book's
film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in
theaters.
“We've had astronauts, we’ve had
engineers—John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says.
“Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn.
Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in
the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this
research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
(NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day
into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
as the space race gained speed.
The West Computers were at the heart
of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described
every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the
greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of
a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more
aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing
pool for specific projects—Christine Darden worked to
advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson
calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved
the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made
their roles obsolete.
The first black computers didn’t
set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of
war…….
Smithsonian
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