Shetterly begins to situate the events in her book within the greater context of American and African American history. She also positions the reader at a point in history when US aerospace technology was advancing more rapidly than ever before, demonstrating again the role technology and science will play in her story. Here, Shetterly immediately trains her spotlight on the women who served as support staff, indicating that this story will be about them, rather than the male physicists and engineers who tend to dominate conversations about aerospace technology. She also signals to the reader, through her mention of the army planes, that her story is not simply about the forgotten computers-it’s also about the significance of Langley and the technology developed there to the American military and to scientific history. He does, however, affix a metal sign to a bathroom that reads COLORED.īy listing numbers and quoting primary sources, Shetterly tosses the reader into a world of manic activity, a time when American military technology has begun to move at breakneck speed. Butler keeps their hiring relatively quiet, allowing them to matriculate into the Langley Laboratory without fanfare. Because Hampton, VA is segregated, the black women work in a separate workspace on the west side of the laboratory, called West Area. Black women from colleges in and around the South apply for, and win, spots as computers at Langley. Under much pressure, Roosevelt gives in, which means that jobs at Langley open up to black women. Philip Randolph, the head of the largest black labor union in the country, has recently demanded that President Roosevelt open wartime job contracts to black applicants. At this time, mathematicians are mostly women, and Melvin Butler spreads the word throughout colleges and universities in the South that Langley needs math graduates to come and work. Every plane prototype gets checked by a team at Langley, so there is a great need for engineers, but also for support staff for these engineers, including mathematicians. To build and design planes, aircraft manufacturers work daily with scientists at the Langley laboratory. That division, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA), is a civilian agency “charged with advancing the scientific understanding of aeronautics and disseminating its findings to the military and private industry.” Since the NACA operates out of the Langley airfield, its scientists are in the midst of army planes, which reminds them that the physics and engineering problems they are working out will have real world implications.Īmerica’s aircraft industry has recently become the largest in the world. Johnson is the one of the only living computers Shetterly features in the book and one of the few Shetterly meets with in person.It’s 1943 and Melvin Butler, the personnel officer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, has a problem: one of Langley’s divisions needs to hire 100 junior physicists and mathematicians, 100 assistant computers, 75 minor laboratory apprentices, 125 helper trainees, and 50 stenographers and typists immediately. She distinguishes herself first as a computer for the Flight Research Team and later as an aerospace technologist, becoming the first woman to publish a research paper on space flight. In one memorable event, astronaut John Glenn-who doesn’t trust the calculations performed by NASA’s new IBM computers-asks Johnson to double-check the numbers for his flight trajectory and landing, and she does so successfully. Though she comes up against racism more than once at the NACA, she maintains her sparkplug personality and manages to charm everyone she comes into contact with, without losing sight of her dedication to her work and her community. Upon joining the segregated NACA workforce in 1953, she refuses to use the colored bathrooms or to allow prejudice to make her feel small. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Johnson worked as a math teacher and briefly pursued graduate study in mathematics before joining the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as a computer under Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine Coleman (who took on the married names Goble and Johnson) is a passionate, outspoken black mathematician who works in the Flight Research Division at the Langley Research Center.
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