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“What I changed, I could what I couldn’t, I endured” were Dorothy Vaughn’s words to Golemba about her time at Langley.
FRIDEN CALCULATOR NPR FULL
The school, which she expected to be superior to the one she matriculated from, was dilapidated: the full cost of segregated school systems was fewer and worse resources for all. To attain that rank, however, she needed special permission to go to classes at the segregated local high school she’d unable to attend as a teen. Mary Jackson, a Virginia native and Hampton local hired in 1951, discussed her frustration with unequal work conditions to an engineer who responded with an invitation to join his team this move launched her career as the first female black engineer. Johnson ignored segregation and gender-based discrimination when she could, unafraid to use a white only bathroom or ask why she, a female computer, could not attend the Space Task Force editorial meetings with the male engineers. Later, they all had to disembark as the bus would not travel through the black part of town. Once her bus entered Virginia, she entered a segregated state she and other black passengers were required to move to the bus’s back. Shetterly correctly observes that it’s important to learn about the computers who worked at NACA/NASA and document their work-all while recording the obstacles these black women overcame.Īmong the book’s poignant moments, Shetterly recounts Katherine Johnson’s journey to Langley from West Virginia in 1953. At times, one wishes for more biographical and less technical detail, but the perspective is critical for understanding her subject’s work. Shetterly, too, describes the complex calculations (Johnson’s figures are compared to a symphony) while underscoring the human cost of miscalculations: loss of life. Moving from World War II to the Cold War and Space Race accompanied by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, she laces her narrative with layperson discussions of aeronautical innovations. Johnson (famed for calculating flight trajectories of the Mercury and Apollo space missions) through the highlights of their careers into the late 1960s, she also performs the daunting task of capturing a cross-section of the eras in which these women worked. Calculating Times of ChangeĪs Shetterly follows Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and Katherine G. The Friden calculator was one of machines that human computers once used to perform complex calculations. Cold War concerns kept NACA’s Langley Research Center (located in Hampton, Virginia) retaining and continuing to hire more computers to process the vast data produced by the research conducted there. Although advertisements for black computers were more discreet during this segregated era, they nonetheless attracted the attention of Dorothy Vaughn (the first black female supervisor) in 1943, one of the three computers Shetterly’s book features. Philip Randolph’s threat to march on Washington, signed an executive order that desegregated the defense industry and made it possible for black women to become computers. Roosevelt, pressured by black labor union leader A.
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The demand for human computers soon outstripped the supply of qualified white women available.
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Although they earned less than male counterparts despite possessing equivalent bachelor degrees, NACA still paid better than teaching did and permitted them to continue working long after marriage and the arrival of children. Golemba notes that “Because of the male shortage and the added attractiveness of paying women less, they rather reluctantly began to hire women as computers.” Despite their qualms, these white women soon proved themselves equal-and better-at the task. Prior to 1935, the male (usually white) engineers performed their own calculations, a tedious task that slowed their research. The first female computing pool, then all white, formed due to necessity. Called computers, they were mathematicians whose work entailed calculating complex equations for the engineers engaged in the then emerging field of aeronautics. Author Margot Lee Shetterly focuses on a particular group of pioneering women working at NACA/NASA, the African-American women who overcame barriers imposed by both their gender and their race. Hidden Figures tells the story of the women who performed the behind-the-scenes work that propelled American aviation triumphs during World War II and Space Age rocketeering.