February 29, 2020 • 45 mins
When NASA was formed in 1958, its prized pool of all-female "computers" desegregated. Until then, mathematicians of color -- including Presidential of Freedom recipient Katherine Johnson -- worked, ate and used the restroom in a separate facilities. Cristen and Caroline shed overdue light on Johnson and her brilliant West Computer teammates who helped launch America into space.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff.
I never told your production of iHeart Radio. The day
this comes out is a leap day. Lappy leap Day,
Happy leap day. Yes, um. And since you could be
(00:29):
listening to this at any time, it is February twenty nine,
just to put a button on that. Yes, So I
keep I'm writing all kinds of wrong. Not only am
I writing twenty nineteen sixteen, and I'm going all over
the place. I'll try to put nineteen nineteen at one
point because I was doing twenty and I was like,
(00:49):
this is so wrong. I'm seeing right. Okay. That makes
me feel better, as does this this classic episode, because
it's one of my I I love math and science
and this is a story that I found really inspiring.
So for this classic episode, we're talking about NASA's Hidden
Computer Women are by we we mean past host Christian Caroline.
(01:13):
We are introducing it right. So obviously you guys know
Katherine Johnson passed away and she died at the age
of one oh one, which is incredible. Um. And she
was the mathematician that was depicted in Hidden Figures. So
this just seemed appropriate, not only for black History Month,
but because to celebrate her life and the amazing things
(01:33):
that she has done in her life and just the
barriers she broken alone exactly. So, without further delay, we
hope that you enjoy this classic Welcome to Stuff Mom
Never told you from House top Works dot Com. Hello,
(01:57):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Carol
and listeners. This episode has it all. It's got space,
it's got science, it has amazing women you've never heard of,
and it also has a rage factor of the fact
that you've never heard of them and the double rage
factor of some racist working conditions. There are literal highs
(02:18):
I'm talking like into space in the space eyes and
lows i e. Racism and segregation. Yes, yeah, um uh.
This episode is I hope as fascinating to listen to
as it was for us to research. It really continues
the theme that we started in our episode on Polly
(02:40):
Murray last time, of women who have sort of been
buried by history, women who played a huge part in
our country's history. In this case, science history with Polly
Murray was legal history and racism in segregation. But the
thing is in all of these amazing women's stories for
(03:02):
so many of them, there's still so little known. We
have names. But it's taking a woman like Margot Lee Shutterley,
who is publishing this year the book Hidden Figures, the
untold story of the African American women who helped the
United States when the Space Race. It's taking Shutterley publishing
a book and then attracting movie attention because it will
(03:24):
be made into a movie next year to get these
women some more attention. Yeah, and we've talked before on
stuff Mo'm never told you about the history of computing
and how women were the first quote unquote computers doing
the computer work, which was considered like low level clerical work. Um.
(03:47):
But even in that knowledge that's only just now becoming
more commonly known. At first, the image was just of
white women doing all of this computing. And now thanks
to Shutterly and um a couple of other researchers that
she's collaborated with, we are learning about these women of
(04:07):
color who were also doing computing work but might have
been segregated in separate working areas, and who were critical
in the case of what we're going to talk about today,
to the space race, to us even landing on the Moon.
Maybe Space Race should be the penny name of this episode,
Space Race Race Space. Um. But I mean it's not
(04:30):
like these women's stories were secret or unknown by any means.
I mean what's so fascinating and like mind boggling is
that you'll see obituaries of some of these women and
it's like, you know, so and so passed away and
she was a family woman and she like did some
stuff for NASA and then she died and you're like
(04:53):
what wait, And so I mean these women's lives and
stories were no secret. I mean, Katherine Johnson, one woman
who will talk about, was just awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom by President Obama. So their their work is
definitely being recognized. But we want to do our part
as Sminty, to dig into this history a little bit
(05:14):
more and enlighten you. Yeah, so before we get into NASA,
we've got to talk about NAKA because the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics was the predecessor to NASA, and it
was formed in nineteen fifteen, which, by the way, was
only a little more than a decade after the airplane
(05:37):
was invented. Yeah, they got right on that. They're like,
I feel like this is important, we should probably do
something with this. So they were formed with the goal
of furthering aeronautical research, and in nineteen fifty eight would
become NASA, but first, in nineteen twenty, NAKA sets up
the Langley Memorial Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to study
(05:58):
aircraft and eventually space flights. Now geographical note that is
important to well. Note Hampton, Virginia is also home to
what was then called Hampton Institute, which is a historically
black college that had started around about the Civil War
(06:20):
to educate former slaves, and it grew into a university
which is still a historically black institution, and many people
in that college. In this case, lady people funneled right
from Hampton to NAKA and Langley. Yeah, I mean the
(06:41):
geographical location almost feels like destiny. And this was something
that Margot Lee Shutterley, who author while is writing right
now Hidden Figures Um notes because she grew up in Hampton,
I believe, and talks about how there were a lot
of African America families who were in STEM careers all
(07:03):
around her. It was very normalized. Yeah. Well, her dad
was also in science and she she talks about how, yes,
I knew black people who had any job, anything from
like a shoeshiner to a teacher, to a lawyer to
a doctor. But so many of the African Americans in
our community around us were in science and technology. And
(07:24):
she said, I just I thought it was what black
people did. I thought you just went into science. And
and I love that tidbit because I feel like Kristen,
anytime you and I talk about stem topics, we always
are very careful to point out how women entered the
field in the first place, because things like mentorship, people
(07:44):
who inspire you as a young person to get involved
in science, they're they're critical. That's a critical role to
inspire young people and to normalize a life spent pursuing science.
And so I love that Shutterley has this normalization of
science around her, as do some of the women will
talk about. Yeah, and it traces all the way back
(08:06):
to the Hampton Institute, which by the way, was book
Or T Washington's alma mater, and Hampton Institute was preceded
by the efforts of an African American woman of means
to educate freed slaves. Because originally in Virginia, there was
a law passive believe pre Civil War um forbidding black
(08:30):
people from getting educated. Yeah, so at great risk, this woman,
I believe her name is Margaret Peak. Yeah, started educating people,
and the institution even educated a group of Native Americans
who had been prisoner elsewhere in the country and sent
to Hampton. They're like, well, we don't we don't know
(08:50):
what to do with these people, so please educate them.
So Hampton has an amazing and very rich history of
educating people in this country. So, in other words, it
was a perfect place for NAKA to set up shop.
With the Langley Memorial Research Center in Langley hires its
first woman, Pearl Young, who becomes an engineer and a
(09:12):
technical editor at NAKA. So she broke the gender bearer there. Pearl. Yeah,
Pearl was the first lady person. But as NAKA is
picking up steam, they need more people. What do we do, well,
I guess we get cheap women with their tiny little
hands who can use the slide rules. So they began
hiring women computers in the nineteen thirties in earnest. But
(09:38):
it's interesting to think about that they called it a
computer pool in the same way that at a big office,
for instance, you might have a stenography pool. These women
could provide a lot of labor, do a lot of
calculations for relatively cheap and their primary task was to
do all the calculating and computation that engineers had been
(10:00):
doing for aircraft and later space missions in order to
free them up for other aspects of research. And the
engineers at this time were exclusively men. So the calculating
and computation, including things such as reading film of monometer boards,
(10:21):
which that just makes me think of the muppets phenomena
do do do do do? So the phenomena boards measured
pressure changes during wind tunnel resistance tests and recorded that
data on spreadsheets, and honestly, this was the part of
the research that took me right back to my high
school physics class and thanks washed over me. Well. Um,
(10:44):
I watched an interview with Christine Darden, who is another
woman we will talk about later in the podcast, But
as she's talking about spreadsheets, she's literally using hand motions
of like indicating how big these spread sheets were, and
that women just for hours and hours, day in and
day out, twenty four hours round the clock, we're entering
(11:05):
data and spreadsheets, and that just made my mind melt
a little. Oh god, it's like Excel I r L
by hand. So in addition to reading the mhenomenal boards,
which it is enometer listeners, but I prefer momenomena, I
prefer mhenomena as well, they also calculated rocket trajectories and
(11:27):
safe reentry angles, and in analyzing the data, they would
plot the results on graph paper in those giant spreadsheet booklets.
And all of this was done by hand, not with
their T I A D three pluses I had with
Frogger on it a T E D five. Yeah, you know,
(11:48):
I'm ritzy. It's the one time in my life when
I was ritzy. Um. But yeah, they would they would
use tools like slide rules, magnifying glasses, and and really
basic calculating machine to get all of this done. But
you know, lest you think that all they were doing
is writing stuff on spreadsheets, I mean, these women had
to have a very specialized knowledge to do this. They
(12:12):
ended up a lot of these women ended up devising
aeronautics and aerospace specific computing methods, and many went on
to write papers and books of their own. So it's
not like they're just sitting there day in the day
out mindlessly calculating. These are brilliant people and they were effective.
They were collectively praised for calculating data more rapidly and accurately,
(12:36):
doing more in the morning than an engineer alone could
finish in a day. Yeah, that's right, Lady brain's powerful. Well,
when World War two hits, NACA needs more people to
work to do these calculations, but the men folk are leaving.
So what happens there's a computer boom. They begin actively
(12:57):
recruiting more women workers. They were advertising in trade journals
and in pamphlets they sent to colleges, and they sent
recruiters out to college campuses, and some of those early
women computers were even in the group who went to
college campuses to try to be like sea ladies, you
can do maths just like I can professionally. And they
(13:19):
had a hand during this time in a lot of
critical projects, ranging uh from everything from World War two
aircraft testing to transnic and supersonic flight research. And because
this was happening during World War two, NAKA was running
twenty four seven, meaning that the computers these women would
(13:40):
work in eight hour shifts around the clock. So this
is disrupting the typical domestic setting for women at the time.
But here's a thing. Not surprisingly, just because these computers
worked harder and faster and we're also desperately needed, they
(14:02):
weren't making equal wages as the fellas, but it was
still gainful employment for women at the time. And this
is echoing our podcast way back when now about secretaries,
where it was like female secretaries would get paid so
much less than male secretaries, but what the women made
was still so much more than they could have made elsewhere.
(14:22):
So similarly, in the nineteen forties, women computers were classified
as sub professionals and could earn between a whopping one thousand,
four d forty dollars and thirty two dollars per year. Meanwhile,
dudes were usually hired as junior engineers, classified as professionals
(14:45):
and started out with dollars. And I keep in mind, though,
that these quote unquote sub professional women still had to
have at least a bachelor's degree, and many of them
had already served as high school teachers for years and
years before they entered this work. Many of them too,
as we'll talk about, we're very unsatisfied with their teaching careers.
(15:07):
But basically, like teaching and nursing were the avenues that
were open, uh, particularly to women of color, as we'll
get into in a bit, But this science work offered
them an entirely new path and a path into aeronautics. Yeah,
and quickly about the money to a teacher would be
making around five fifty dollars a year, So in that context,
(15:32):
this is good money, even though it's not equitable money.
But that doesn't mean that there weren't progressive policies in
place at Naka. Yeah. So we've talked a lot in
previous episodes about uh, particularly teaching, but also other fields
where at the time UH, if you got married and
or started a family, you were expected to leave. There
(15:55):
were policies against hiring married women, especially pregnant women, because
it was expected like the home is where you're supposed
to be, you're a woman. But Naka was like we
need you, you're so smart, please stay. So very importantly,
marriage and family based discrimination was not a thing at Naka.
(16:16):
They didn't have any of the whole like get rid
of women when they get married. And in fact, after
World War Two, when so many women were forced out
of the workplace once the men came home, Naka was like,
no, no no, no, can you please stay? You're so smart?
Can you please keep doing the math? Please do the
math well. And several of those computers were also married
to NACA engineers. So this, like you said, provided women
(16:39):
entry into aeronautics and provided an alternative and an exciting
alternative if you were into science and math. And this
wasn't just a job for white ladies. African American women
computers were part of naka's hiring push. And we will
introduce you to these women. We come right back from
(17:01):
a quick break. Now. Unfortunately, it did take a presidential
executive order for African American women to officially be part
of naka's hiring push. Um because back in nineteen forty one,
(17:28):
a Philip Randolph, who was a tremendous labor and civil
rights leader, pressured FDR into issuing Executive Order eight O
two Yeah, which says there shall be no discrimination in
the employment of workers in defense industries or government because
of race, creed, color, or national origin. So that just
(17:51):
opens the hiring floodgates. And again NAK is placing ads
and papers, sending recruiters out, but this time they're putting
ads in black communities. News papers, and they were putting
out ads for everyone from janitors to laborers to women
with math and chemistry degrees. So this means that they're
hiring smart African American women. But this is also the
(18:17):
era of segregation. So black women at Langley worked eight
and even use the restroom in separate facilities in what
was called the West Area, and they were referred to
as the West Area Computers, and their facilities were so
far removed from where the white computers worked. A lot
(18:39):
of those women, the white women, didn't even know that
the West Area Computers existed. Yeah, and I mean, so well,
it's wonderful that all of these women of color were hired.
I mean, it wasn't without its problems. For instance, if
you were a single white women, you got to live
in really nice dorms at the facility, but if you
were an unmarried black woman, you had to have the
(19:02):
extra expense of finding a place to stay in town.
And also the lab was built on the side of
a plantation. Yeah, yeah, that's that's unfortunate. But I mean,
what else are you going to do with all that
land in Virginia, I guess, but build amazing science facilities
on it? But build rocket ships exactly, just blast right
(19:23):
on out of that past. But even within NACO once
they got in the door, obviously they were facing these uh,
the segregation, and they also faced barriers to advancement compared
to their white counterparts. Um for instance, one woman hired
to work in a chemistry division ended up being transferred
to the all black West Computer Division because black women
(19:46):
weren't hired for that original chemistry spots. And this is
ironic since African American computers had to take a chemistry
course at nearby Hampton Institute before starting their jobs, So
they even had a higher bar that they had to
cross to get in the door. Yeah, and so how
did some of them end up moving up the ranks
(20:08):
if they were segregated off an entirely separate facilities as well,
it was the black computers, those West Area computers who
would be regularly quote unquote loaned two different branches of
NAKA when help was needed doing calculations or data processing.
And eventually the computing divisions did become less segregated, and
(20:31):
when NACA became NASA, those segregated facilities were completely done
away with. And we've been talking about the West Area
computers as one kind of impersonal group. But now comes
the fun part of the podcast where we get to
highlight these individual women who were doing all sorts of
(20:55):
incredible trailblazing work. And one of the first we're going
to talk about Miriam Daniel Man And she was born
in nineteen o seven in Georgia. She was a valedictorian
of her prep school. And then she graduated from Talladega
College with a chemistry major and math minor. What up
stem And she worked as a teacher for a few years.
(21:16):
Then she and her husband moved to Virginia, where he
gets a job at Hampton Institute Destiny, uh in nineteen
forty three, the same year that NACA puts out the
call for workers of color. She hears about the job
opening and Land's job. Of course, she and the other
(21:36):
colored computers as they were called, did have to take
that chemistry class at Hampton, which is kind of a
joke considering how qualified these women already were, I mean, valedictorian,
chemistry major, math minor. This is no dummy, um. And
the women were coming in Tanaka with just as many
(21:57):
qualifications as the men and still being had lesson how
to take a course blah. Anyway, I love the hints
of man's humor that we get from an account that
her daughter wrote. Her daughter remembers Miriam bringing home the
cafeteria sign that said colored, which of course then was replaced.
(22:18):
But I love that she was like, nope, swiping this,
taking this away now. I I hate segregation. Um. And
once NAKA became NASA, she was one of the computers
who worked on that Mercury program making calculations for John
Glenn's and Alan Shepherd's flights. And next up, we've got
to talk about Dorothy Vaughan. Because Dorothy Vaughn was not
(22:40):
gonna let white women as managers stop her, so she
was a prodigy hands down. She was born in Kansas
City in nine. She graduated from Wilbur Forest University in
nine and after working as a math teacher. Yet again
we have the teaching coming. First, she tired by Langley
(23:01):
Ine on the West Computers team, and in nineteen forty
nine she became the first black manager of the West
Computers and she was called the head Computer, which is
the coolest job title computer. Um. She was the first
black manager though of the West Computers at that time
(23:22):
because before then even the West Computers managers had all
been white women according to policy, right exactly, And so
this makes her the first black manager at NACA period,
and this granted her a much greater visibility and a
lot more opportunities for collaboration. She worked with other computers
(23:42):
on a handbook for algebraic methods and calculating machines. And
I know that, you know, when you get to talking
about managers, sometimes they can be jerks, but she was
not one of them. This was a beloved both mathematician
and manager because she advocated for the West Computers, but
she also intervened on behalf of women workers in general
(24:04):
when they deserved promotions. Are raises white or black. If
you worked hard and deserved to raise, Vaughan was going
to go to the map for you. And the engineers
valued her too. They took her personnel recommendations seriously, but
they often wanted her to be the one to work
on the more challenging work and calculations when they had
(24:26):
stuff to get done. They were like, oh, we really
appreciate to be you're recommending, Like, we we trust you
and we'll hire that person for this division, but could
you do it? Thanks? Dorothy uh In. NAKA transitions to NASA,
as we've mentioned, and the segregated facilities are shuttered. And
this is when Vaughan and many of the former West
(24:47):
computers are moved to electronic computing in the new Analysis
and Computation Division. When NASA gets the machine computeurs and
Vaughan continues her education, she becomes an expert in for Tran,
which is a computer programming language still in use today
(25:07):
for scientific computing. Oh and meanwhile she's also raising a
family and one of her children grow up to work
for NASA. Talk about awesome mom role model. I know,
I love it. I love that there's like a NASA
legacy in a family. It's just the family business, you know, NASA. UM.
And then the next one we want to talk about
(25:29):
is the amazing Catherine Johnson. She's the physicist and mathematician
who worked with both Man and Vaughan and who was
recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom UM. But she
she was drawn to math from an early age. She
would write later, math it's just there. You're either right
or you're wrong, and that's what I like about it.
And she also has told numerous interviewers that I counted everything,
(25:52):
the steps, the dishes, the stars in the sky, and
her family growing up was pretty poor. They were so
invested in Katherine and her siblings education and very encouraging
of them. Um. And in school, she was a math
prodigy and she was inspired by her geometry teacher, Miss Turner.
(26:15):
Shout out to teachers and again more mentorship. Um. And
she graduated from high school at fourteen. But listen, her
parents were so invested in Katherine and her schooling that
because there was no high school for black children in
her original hometown, her parents sent her in her siblings
(26:37):
to a lab school on the all black West Virginia
State Institute campus. Yeah. So I mean no small feet
that this woman graduated from high school at fourteen. Yeah.
And then she graduated from college with degrees in math
and French at eighteen. In French, the brain is an
amazing thing, especially when it belongs to Katherine Johnson. Well,
(26:58):
and she even had more men tourship. In college. She
was taught by Dr William W. Chefflin Claytor, who spotted
her potential as a research mathematician, and he would go
on to to achieve a degree of fame for his
own research, And so I mean that reflects so amazingly
on Catherine that she has this person helping guide her
(27:19):
through her research. But in nineteen thirty nine, she was
actually one of three black students selected to integrate West
Virginia University's grad program. And she stayed just a year
before getting married and starting a family. And there's a
while here where she is raising her kids, she's teaching.
(27:41):
But then in nineteen fifty three, she ends up taking
a computer job at Langley because the year before her
husband had fallen ill and she needed to get back
to work. She had taken time off from teaching math,
French and music. So she gets in at Langley because
of naka's recruitment efforts for its Guidance and Navigation department.
(28:04):
And the first year though that she applied, they had
already filled their quota. So she reapplied the next year
and got in. So lesson learned if at first you
do not get the job, you can always reapply. Yeah,
especially if you get to work under Dorothy Vaughan like
she did. Yeah, And we're so lucky that Katherine Johnson reapplied,
(28:25):
because I mean, just weeks after she started in the
computer pool. She starts to just start asking questions about, Wait,
why are all of the people on the research team guys, Wait,
why aren't any of the women computers invited to these meetings?
Is there a policy or law against me not being
allowed to be here? No, okay, I'm just gonna be here.
(28:46):
I'm gonna ask a lot of questions. Yeah, it's amazing.
She She credits this habit of incessantly asking questions with
being asked to fill in on the all Dude flight
research team. She got to research airplane gust alleviation and
wake turbulence. And in nineteen fifty eight she moves from
(29:08):
the flight Mechanics branch to the spacecraft Controls branch, whose
job it was to get men into space like a SAP.
And it's in that space research division where she seriously
makes her mark and she doesn't waste any time. In
nineteen sixty she becomes the Flight Research Division's first credited
female author when she co authors a report with equations
(29:30):
that describe the trajectories for placing the manned mercury capsule
into low Earth orbit and bringing it back safely. And
then in nineteen sixty one she calculated the trajectory that
put the first American Alan shepherd into space. How am
I thirty one and just learning this incredible women's history fact.
(29:51):
Caroline Well, and I love that she has no lack
of confidence When she's looking back on this in two
thousand eight, she tells an inner you are the early
trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict
where it would be at any point. Early on, when
they said they wanted the capsule to come down at
a certain place, they were trying to compute when it
should start, I said, let me do it. I just
(30:13):
like to imagine that that was her being like, oh,
for God's sake, she says, you tell me when you
want it and where you want it to land, and
I'll do it backwards and I'll tell you when to
take off. That was my forte. What a smooth operator.
Just be confident like Catherine so confident in nineteen sixty two,
despite the fact that actual computer machines by this point
(30:37):
we're being used to perform calculations. When it was John
Glenn's turn to go into space and orbit the Earth
in m A six, he specifically asked Johnson to run
the numbers against what the computer had come up with,
so in his pre flight checklist he had quote, have
the girl double check the numbers. Yeah, and she said
(30:59):
that it was very nervous, but I knew that my
calculations were correct, and they were so over an ounce
of Catherine's confidence. Uh. And in the mid sixties she
worked on trajectories for the Lunar Orbiter program, which mapped
the Moon's surface before the nineteen sixty nine moon landing,
speaking of which, in nineteen she calculated the trajectory for
(31:23):
the Apollo eleven flight to the Moon. And it doesn't
stop there. In seventy she collaborated on the backup calculation
that brought Apollo thirteen astronauts home safely. So it is
little wonder then that she was awarded the highest civilian
honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November. And
(31:45):
there's so many other women at NAKA slash NASA slash
Langley to mention, but so little has been known about
them all these years. And that's actually something that hidden
Figures author Margot Lee shudderly is working to rectify. She
has teamed up with McAlister College researchers Duchess Harris, who
(32:08):
is the granddaughter of Miriam Daniel Man, one of the
first computers, and Lucy Short on what's called the Human
Computer Project, which is their digital effort to document the
lives and work of women who worked as computers at Langley.
And so there, I mean, there are names that we
(32:30):
know that I just wasn't able to find enough information about,
women like Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, and the very prolific
writer and researcher Barbara Holly. All I know is her name,
and I know that she researched a lot of stuff
that my brain can barely comprehend um, But I just
don't have that much background. One of those women also
(32:52):
is Katherine Pedrew, who graduated from Storer College in ninety
three with a chemistry degree and went to work for
naka A imediately. She retired in nineteen six, and she
was involved in research on balance in the Instrument Research Division.
And that's about as much as I could find on Catherine. Well,
and we have more information on women who worked at
(33:14):
NASA in more recent years. Relatively, there's Melbo Roy Mountain,
who was Howard University alum. She earned a master's in math,
who became Assistant Chief of Research Programs at NASA's Trajectory
and Geodynamics Division in the nineteen sixties. And she I
mean at this point to consider how revolutionary it is
(33:37):
that she's the head of a team and not so
long ago you have Miriam Daniel Man taking down the
colored sign from the cafeteria spunk like. So, Mountain leads
a team of mathematicians who did the intense computational work
of launching and tracking echo satellites in Earth's orbit, and
(33:59):
Mountain help a lot of impressive jobs during her time
at NASA. In she was promoted to head programmer in
charge of the team that determined aircraft orbits in space.
She actually designed computer programs to predict trajectories and aircraft
locations before transitioning into the job that Kristen was talking about,
(34:20):
that assistant chief of Research Programs. And finally, we're going
to circle back to a name that you mentioned early
in the episode, Caroline Christine man Darden, who was the
first black woman at NASA Langley to be promoted into
senior executive service. And her bio is fantastic as well,
because going back to childhood, her interests in math was
(34:44):
sparked exploring how bikes and cars worked with her dad
rad dad alert. And here's another case of a kid
whose parents really valued her education. They ended up sending
her to a boarding school in Asheville, where a geometry
teacher he her fall in love with the subject, just
like Miss Turner. Katherine Johnson's geometry teacher. Yes, so important.
(35:09):
I like geometry too, and I hope they are geometry
teachers listening who feel very special right now. I also
loved geometry. That was my favorite math in high school.
I liked now. Granted, I literally was tutored in math
from the time I was in sixth grade to twelfth
grade because I am a word person. That's just how
it shook out. Um. But I really liked Algebran geometry,
(35:30):
Physics not so much, and chemistry I barely passed. So
I am impressed from all these women, to say the least. Um.
But in nineteen sixty two, Christine graduates from Hampton Institute
with a bachelor's in math education in a minor in
physics at just twenty, and she starts teaching. Because the
whole thing that she talks about in that interview, I
(35:53):
watched which I encourage you to google. Is that her
father was so concerned about his daughter not having a job,
and so he did what a lot of parents do,
and he's like, UM, I know, you have this one
interest which is cool, and that's math and that's awesome. However,
can you please major in something that will actually let
you get hired after college. So he strongly, strongly, strongly
(36:17):
encouraged his daughter to major in education because, as she
points out in the interview, like you know, they're just there.
Still weren't a ton of jobs open, like high paying
jobs and secure jobs open to women at the time.
So she's like, I, as much as I loved math,
I had to be prepared to do whatever I could
to make a living and helps for my family. And
(36:38):
so she does teach for a while. But in the meantime,
as she's teaching and still going to school, she's participating
in lunch counter sit in so she's participating in the
civil rights movement at the same time that she's you know,
pursuing math and eventually gonna shoot to NASA like a
rocket ship pocket ship up of awesome. So in nineteen
(37:02):
sixties seven, after studying physics and math at Virginia State College.
She earns her masters and math, and she's hired for
the Langley computer pool. But she is not going to
remain in that pool. She needs to cannonball into the
deep end. So in the seventies, as computers like machine
(37:23):
computers like we think of today, we're starting to become
a thing. Darten was one of the first to work
on developing computer programs because she'd studied programming in her masters,
so she began researching also Sonic Boom minimization, and after
five years in computing and programming support, she I mean
(37:45):
she just felt limited. She didn't feel like she had
enough knowledge of everything that she was working on, and
also she hadn't gotten promoted, so she was she was
getting a little anxious to do some new stuff. Yeah,
So in nineteen seven any two, she complains to the
section head about men who were coming in with similar
(38:05):
credentials but getting more opportunities for advancement. I mean, this
is the same kind of thing that we're hearing from
the very get go of women being hired first at
NAKA and then at NASA. So he transfers her to
Sonic Boom Research, like like you do well and I
think that she had even suggested to him because she
had started doing sonic boom research on her own, that
(38:27):
that's the direction that she should go in. And her
career path also echoes Katherine Johnson in the sense of
speaking up, calling attention to what you know and what
you would be good at, incessant questioning very important. Uh
In she earns a PhD in engineering and becomes one
(38:47):
of NASA's foremost experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms.
And one of the most endearing things about Johnson and
Darden's ten years at NASA is how they were not
only invested in their nine to five work, but also
in outreach and encouraging girls, in particular to get into
(39:08):
STEM like they did. Yeah, work that is so important,
and I mean, yes, the NASA work is important, but
that outreach work and providing visible role models to children
is so important, and that is something that NASA itself
has highlighted. They put out a report in um that
looked at data stretching from two thousand eight to twelve
that found that women of color make up just five
(39:31):
and a half percent of aerospace tech engineers, and they
linked this to quote inherent biases and stereotyping that exists
for women of color in the science and engineering workplace.
In addition, they write, there are challenges related to the
lack of mentorship and isolation, and so they strongly encourage
(39:52):
in this this report those same outreach efforts, but in
an official capacity. So, yes, it's so important to have
these visible figure is like Johnson and like Darden. But
now the this NASA report is saying, we have to
continue our efforts to create a pipeline. In the same
way that having Langley next door to Hampton created a
(40:13):
you know, a figurative pipeline of people geniuses to Langley.
NASA still needs to continue to do that kind of
work of encouraging boys and girls, but in this case
women of color to join their ranks and be among
their researchers. Yeah. I mean, one astounding statistic is that
(40:33):
there are around one hundred black female physicists in the US. Well, yeah,
so it's not just an issue at NASA. I mean
this is across the board um in the US and
likely abroad as well, although there are countries that are
far better in terms of gender equity in stem fields.
(40:57):
But now we're curious to know who your stem heroines are,
and especially the unsung ones, because as you can probably tell,
it really excites Caroline and me to learn about new
not new, but women we should have known about a
long time ago. We were doing all sorts of trailblazing
and brainpowering. Yeah, so I encourage all of you. If
(41:22):
you're at school or at work and you're starting to
doubt yourself, I want you to ask yourself, what would
Katherine Johnson do? She knew who she was, she knew
what she was good at, and she was not going
to stop asking questions or counting or counting, just counted everything. Well, Listeners,
you can email us mom Stuff at house stuff works
(41:44):
dot com, or you can also tweet us your thoughts
at mom Stuff Podcast, or send us a message on Facebook.
And we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. I have a letter here from Sarah
in response to our abortion episodes. She says, I love
(42:07):
the show and love that you ladies are so vocally
supportive of a woman's right to have an abortion if
she wishes. However, there seems to be this narrative of
the good abortion, and more specifically, the hard decision abortion
that I find frustrating. Yes, there are many women for
whom choosing to have an abortion is stressful, emotional, and
heart wrenching, but there are just as many women for
whom it is a no brainer decision. When I found
(42:30):
out I was pregnant at twenty one, I didn't even
have to think twice before calling an abortion clinic and
making an appointment. I have been using contraception because I
was not ready to have a child, and I had
always known that I would abort in the case of
an unplanned pregnancy. I feel like there is a cultural
perception of the good abortion, and it includes handwringing with
a long term boyfriend or a high stakes job or
(42:51):
a traumatic situation, and that simply isn't always the case.
Women should feel free and empowered to have an abortion
simply because they don't want to be pregnant, which I'm
sure you already know, so thank you, Sarah. Well. I've
got a letter here from Sierra about psychic women line
of employment far different than the NASA work we were
(43:11):
talking about in today's episode, but she writes about how
she briefly worked as a phone psychic when she was
having some trouble finding steadier employment, and she says you
would collect as much personal information from the collar as
you could before launching into the reading in order to
give your psychic forecast some degree of believable, very similitude,
(43:35):
and this may speak to why so many psychics are women.
The people who are in the company I worked for
were of the opinion that women were better at teasing
out the nuggets of personal intel that were so crucial
to creating a believable psychic experience. My collars were pretty
evenly split between men and women, but both groups seemed
more willing to open up to a female psychic and
(43:55):
divulge personal details without suspicion that I could then work
into my re eatings. I had a male roommate at
the time who worked at the same company, and he
had a harder time with callers getting aggressive when he
asked personal questions. I didn't work as a phone psychic
for long because it was a very sad job. I
knew I had no psychic abilities, and most people who
called were in desperate situations and just looking for someone
(44:17):
to tell them it would be okay. I felt terrible
about the fact that they were paying three dollars a
minute to get support during some of the darkest times
of their lives, and the company's only directive to me
was to keep callers on the line for as long
as possible. I also felt exploited because it's emotionally draining
to listen to the sad stories of strangers and concoct
b s designed only to fleece them out of money,
(44:38):
and I was only being paid twenty cents a minute.
The emotional labor the job demanded, combined with a lack
of financial security, was just too much and I quit
after a few months. I love the show well. Thanks
Sierra for sharing your experiences with us and now listeners,
we want to hear what's on your minds Mom. Stuff
(44:59):
at how so works dot com is our email address
and for links all of our social media as well
as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts with our
sources so you can learn more about the incredible women
of color who worked at NAKA and NASA. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
(45:23):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how staff works dot com
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff.
I never told your production of iHeart Radio. The day
this comes out is a leap day. Lappy leap Day,
Happy leap day. Yes, um. And since you could be
(00:29):
listening to this at any time, it is February twenty nine,
just to put a button on that. Yes, So I
keep I'm writing all kinds of wrong. Not only am
I writing twenty nineteen sixteen, and I'm going all over
the place. I'll try to put nineteen nineteen at one
point because I was doing twenty and I was like,
(00:49):
this is so wrong. I'm seeing right. Okay. That makes
me feel better, as does this this classic episode, because
it's one of my I I love math and science
and this is a story that I found really inspiring.
So for this classic episode, we're talking about NASA's Hidden
Computer Women are by we we mean past host Christian Caroline.
(01:13):
We are introducing it right. So obviously you guys know
Katherine Johnson passed away and she died at the age
of one oh one, which is incredible. Um. And she
was the mathematician that was depicted in Hidden Figures. So
this just seemed appropriate, not only for black History Month,
but because to celebrate her life and the amazing things
(01:33):
that she has done in her life and just the
barriers she broken alone exactly. So, without further delay, we
hope that you enjoy this classic Welcome to Stuff Mom
Never told you from House top Works dot Com. Hello,
(01:57):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Carol
and listeners. This episode has it all. It's got space,
it's got science, it has amazing women you've never heard of,
and it also has a rage factor of the fact
that you've never heard of them and the double rage
factor of some racist working conditions. There are literal highs
(02:18):
I'm talking like into space in the space eyes and
lows i e. Racism and segregation. Yes, yeah, um uh.
This episode is I hope as fascinating to listen to
as it was for us to research. It really continues
the theme that we started in our episode on Polly
(02:40):
Murray last time, of women who have sort of been
buried by history, women who played a huge part in
our country's history. In this case, science history with Polly
Murray was legal history and racism in segregation. But the
thing is in all of these amazing women's stories for
(03:02):
so many of them, there's still so little known. We
have names. But it's taking a woman like Margot Lee Shutterley,
who is publishing this year the book Hidden Figures, the
untold story of the African American women who helped the
United States when the Space Race. It's taking Shutterley publishing
a book and then attracting movie attention because it will
(03:24):
be made into a movie next year to get these
women some more attention. Yeah, and we've talked before on
stuff Mo'm never told you about the history of computing
and how women were the first quote unquote computers doing
the computer work, which was considered like low level clerical work. Um.
(03:47):
But even in that knowledge that's only just now becoming
more commonly known. At first, the image was just of
white women doing all of this computing. And now thanks
to Shutterly and um a couple of other researchers that
she's collaborated with, we are learning about these women of
(04:07):
color who were also doing computing work but might have
been segregated in separate working areas, and who were critical
in the case of what we're going to talk about today,
to the space race, to us even landing on the Moon.
Maybe Space Race should be the penny name of this episode,
Space Race Race Space. Um. But I mean it's not
(04:30):
like these women's stories were secret or unknown by any means.
I mean what's so fascinating and like mind boggling is
that you'll see obituaries of some of these women and
it's like, you know, so and so passed away and
she was a family woman and she like did some
stuff for NASA and then she died and you're like
(04:53):
what wait, And so I mean these women's lives and
stories were no secret. I mean, Katherine Johnson, one woman
who will talk about, was just awarded the Presidential Medal
of Freedom by President Obama. So their their work is
definitely being recognized. But we want to do our part
as Sminty, to dig into this history a little bit
(05:14):
more and enlighten you. Yeah, so before we get into NASA,
we've got to talk about NAKA because the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics was the predecessor to NASA, and it
was formed in nineteen fifteen, which, by the way, was
only a little more than a decade after the airplane
(05:37):
was invented. Yeah, they got right on that. They're like,
I feel like this is important, we should probably do
something with this. So they were formed with the goal
of furthering aeronautical research, and in nineteen fifty eight would
become NASA, but first, in nineteen twenty, NAKA sets up
the Langley Memorial Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to study
(05:58):
aircraft and eventually space flights. Now geographical note that is
important to well. Note Hampton, Virginia is also home to
what was then called Hampton Institute, which is a historically
black college that had started around about the Civil War
(06:20):
to educate former slaves, and it grew into a university
which is still a historically black institution, and many people
in that college. In this case, lady people funneled right
from Hampton to NAKA and Langley. Yeah, I mean the
(06:41):
geographical location almost feels like destiny. And this was something
that Margot Lee Shutterley, who author while is writing right
now Hidden Figures Um notes because she grew up in Hampton,
I believe, and talks about how there were a lot
of African America families who were in STEM careers all
(07:03):
around her. It was very normalized. Yeah. Well, her dad
was also in science and she she talks about how, yes,
I knew black people who had any job, anything from
like a shoeshiner to a teacher, to a lawyer to
a doctor. But so many of the African Americans in
our community around us were in science and technology. And
(07:24):
she said, I just I thought it was what black
people did. I thought you just went into science. And
and I love that tidbit because I feel like Kristen,
anytime you and I talk about stem topics, we always
are very careful to point out how women entered the
field in the first place, because things like mentorship, people
(07:44):
who inspire you as a young person to get involved
in science, they're they're critical. That's a critical role to
inspire young people and to normalize a life spent pursuing science.
And so I love that Shutterley has this normalization of
science around her, as do some of the women will
talk about. Yeah, and it traces all the way back
(08:06):
to the Hampton Institute, which by the way, was book
Or T Washington's alma mater, and Hampton Institute was preceded
by the efforts of an African American woman of means
to educate freed slaves. Because originally in Virginia, there was
a law passive believe pre Civil War um forbidding black
(08:30):
people from getting educated. Yeah, so at great risk, this woman,
I believe her name is Margaret Peak. Yeah, started educating people,
and the institution even educated a group of Native Americans
who had been prisoner elsewhere in the country and sent
to Hampton. They're like, well, we don't we don't know
(08:50):
what to do with these people, so please educate them.
So Hampton has an amazing and very rich history of
educating people in this country. So, in other words, it
was a perfect place for NAKA to set up shop.
With the Langley Memorial Research Center in Langley hires its
first woman, Pearl Young, who becomes an engineer and a
(09:12):
technical editor at NAKA. So she broke the gender bearer there. Pearl. Yeah,
Pearl was the first lady person. But as NAKA is
picking up steam, they need more people. What do we do, well,
I guess we get cheap women with their tiny little
hands who can use the slide rules. So they began
hiring women computers in the nineteen thirties in earnest. But
(09:38):
it's interesting to think about that they called it a
computer pool in the same way that at a big office,
for instance, you might have a stenography pool. These women
could provide a lot of labor, do a lot of
calculations for relatively cheap and their primary task was to
do all the calculating and computation that engineers had been
(10:00):
doing for aircraft and later space missions in order to
free them up for other aspects of research. And the
engineers at this time were exclusively men. So the calculating
and computation, including things such as reading film of monometer boards,
(10:21):
which that just makes me think of the muppets phenomena
do do do do do? So the phenomena boards measured
pressure changes during wind tunnel resistance tests and recorded that
data on spreadsheets, and honestly, this was the part of
the research that took me right back to my high
school physics class and thanks washed over me. Well. Um,
(10:44):
I watched an interview with Christine Darden, who is another
woman we will talk about later in the podcast, But
as she's talking about spreadsheets, she's literally using hand motions
of like indicating how big these spread sheets were, and
that women just for hours and hours, day in and
day out, twenty four hours round the clock, we're entering
(11:05):
data and spreadsheets, and that just made my mind melt
a little. Oh god, it's like Excel I r L
by hand. So in addition to reading the mhenomenal boards,
which it is enometer listeners, but I prefer momenomena, I
prefer mhenomena as well, they also calculated rocket trajectories and
(11:27):
safe reentry angles, and in analyzing the data, they would
plot the results on graph paper in those giant spreadsheet booklets.
And all of this was done by hand, not with
their T I A D three pluses I had with
Frogger on it a T E D five. Yeah, you know,
(11:48):
I'm ritzy. It's the one time in my life when
I was ritzy. Um. But yeah, they would they would
use tools like slide rules, magnifying glasses, and and really
basic calculating machine to get all of this done. But
you know, lest you think that all they were doing
is writing stuff on spreadsheets, I mean, these women had
to have a very specialized knowledge to do this. They
(12:12):
ended up a lot of these women ended up devising
aeronautics and aerospace specific computing methods, and many went on
to write papers and books of their own. So it's
not like they're just sitting there day in the day
out mindlessly calculating. These are brilliant people and they were effective.
They were collectively praised for calculating data more rapidly and accurately,
(12:36):
doing more in the morning than an engineer alone could
finish in a day. Yeah, that's right, Lady brain's powerful. Well,
when World War two hits, NACA needs more people to
work to do these calculations, but the men folk are leaving.
So what happens there's a computer boom. They begin actively
(12:57):
recruiting more women workers. They were advertising in trade journals
and in pamphlets they sent to colleges, and they sent
recruiters out to college campuses, and some of those early
women computers were even in the group who went to
college campuses to try to be like sea ladies, you
can do maths just like I can professionally. And they
(13:19):
had a hand during this time in a lot of
critical projects, ranging uh from everything from World War two
aircraft testing to transnic and supersonic flight research. And because
this was happening during World War two, NAKA was running
twenty four seven, meaning that the computers these women would
(13:40):
work in eight hour shifts around the clock. So this
is disrupting the typical domestic setting for women at the time.
But here's a thing. Not surprisingly, just because these computers
worked harder and faster and we're also desperately needed, they
(14:02):
weren't making equal wages as the fellas, but it was
still gainful employment for women at the time. And this
is echoing our podcast way back when now about secretaries,
where it was like female secretaries would get paid so
much less than male secretaries, but what the women made
was still so much more than they could have made elsewhere.
(14:22):
So similarly, in the nineteen forties, women computers were classified
as sub professionals and could earn between a whopping one thousand,
four d forty dollars and thirty two dollars per year. Meanwhile,
dudes were usually hired as junior engineers, classified as professionals
(14:45):
and started out with dollars. And I keep in mind, though,
that these quote unquote sub professional women still had to
have at least a bachelor's degree, and many of them
had already served as high school teachers for years and
years before they entered this work. Many of them too,
as we'll talk about, we're very unsatisfied with their teaching careers.
(15:07):
But basically, like teaching and nursing were the avenues that
were open, uh, particularly to women of color, as we'll
get into in a bit, But this science work offered
them an entirely new path and a path into aeronautics. Yeah,
and quickly about the money to a teacher would be
making around five fifty dollars a year, So in that context,
(15:32):
this is good money, even though it's not equitable money.
But that doesn't mean that there weren't progressive policies in
place at Naka. Yeah. So we've talked a lot in
previous episodes about uh, particularly teaching, but also other fields
where at the time UH, if you got married and
or started a family, you were expected to leave. There
(15:55):
were policies against hiring married women, especially pregnant women, because
it was expected like the home is where you're supposed
to be, you're a woman. But Naka was like we
need you, you're so smart, please stay. So very importantly,
marriage and family based discrimination was not a thing at Naka.
(16:16):
They didn't have any of the whole like get rid
of women when they get married. And in fact, after
World War Two, when so many women were forced out
of the workplace once the men came home, Naka was like,
no, no no, no, can you please stay? You're so smart?
Can you please keep doing the math? Please do the
math well. And several of those computers were also married
to NACA engineers. So this, like you said, provided women
(16:39):
entry into aeronautics and provided an alternative and an exciting
alternative if you were into science and math. And this
wasn't just a job for white ladies. African American women
computers were part of naka's hiring push. And we will
introduce you to these women. We come right back from
(17:01):
a quick break. Now. Unfortunately, it did take a presidential
executive order for African American women to officially be part
of naka's hiring push. Um because back in nineteen forty one,
(17:28):
a Philip Randolph, who was a tremendous labor and civil
rights leader, pressured FDR into issuing Executive Order eight O
two Yeah, which says there shall be no discrimination in
the employment of workers in defense industries or government because
of race, creed, color, or national origin. So that just
(17:51):
opens the hiring floodgates. And again NAK is placing ads
and papers, sending recruiters out, but this time they're putting
ads in black communities. News papers, and they were putting
out ads for everyone from janitors to laborers to women
with math and chemistry degrees. So this means that they're
hiring smart African American women. But this is also the
(18:17):
era of segregation. So black women at Langley worked eight
and even use the restroom in separate facilities in what
was called the West Area, and they were referred to
as the West Area Computers, and their facilities were so
far removed from where the white computers worked. A lot
(18:39):
of those women, the white women, didn't even know that
the West Area Computers existed. Yeah, and I mean, so well,
it's wonderful that all of these women of color were hired.
I mean, it wasn't without its problems. For instance, if
you were a single white women, you got to live
in really nice dorms at the facility, but if you
were an unmarried black woman, you had to have the
(19:02):
extra expense of finding a place to stay in town.
And also the lab was built on the side of
a plantation. Yeah, yeah, that's that's unfortunate. But I mean,
what else are you going to do with all that
land in Virginia, I guess, but build amazing science facilities
on it? But build rocket ships exactly, just blast right
(19:23):
on out of that past. But even within NACO once
they got in the door, obviously they were facing these uh,
the segregation, and they also faced barriers to advancement compared
to their white counterparts. Um for instance, one woman hired
to work in a chemistry division ended up being transferred
to the all black West Computer Division because black women
(19:46):
weren't hired for that original chemistry spots. And this is
ironic since African American computers had to take a chemistry
course at nearby Hampton Institute before starting their jobs, So
they even had a higher bar that they had to
cross to get in the door. Yeah, and so how
did some of them end up moving up the ranks
(20:08):
if they were segregated off an entirely separate facilities as well,
it was the black computers, those West Area computers who
would be regularly quote unquote loaned two different branches of
NAKA when help was needed doing calculations or data processing.
And eventually the computing divisions did become less segregated, and
(20:31):
when NACA became NASA, those segregated facilities were completely done
away with. And we've been talking about the West Area
computers as one kind of impersonal group. But now comes
the fun part of the podcast where we get to
highlight these individual women who were doing all sorts of
(20:55):
incredible trailblazing work. And one of the first we're going
to talk about Miriam Daniel Man And she was born
in nineteen o seven in Georgia. She was a valedictorian
of her prep school. And then she graduated from Talladega
College with a chemistry major and math minor. What up
stem And she worked as a teacher for a few years.
(21:16):
Then she and her husband moved to Virginia, where he
gets a job at Hampton Institute Destiny, uh in nineteen
forty three, the same year that NACA puts out the
call for workers of color. She hears about the job
opening and Land's job. Of course, she and the other
(21:36):
colored computers as they were called, did have to take
that chemistry class at Hampton, which is kind of a
joke considering how qualified these women already were, I mean, valedictorian,
chemistry major, math minor. This is no dummy, um. And
the women were coming in Tanaka with just as many
(21:57):
qualifications as the men and still being had lesson how
to take a course blah. Anyway, I love the hints
of man's humor that we get from an account that
her daughter wrote. Her daughter remembers Miriam bringing home the
cafeteria sign that said colored, which of course then was replaced.
(22:18):
But I love that she was like, nope, swiping this,
taking this away now. I I hate segregation. Um. And
once NAKA became NASA, she was one of the computers
who worked on that Mercury program making calculations for John
Glenn's and Alan Shepherd's flights. And next up, we've got
to talk about Dorothy Vaughan. Because Dorothy Vaughn was not
(22:40):
gonna let white women as managers stop her, so she
was a prodigy hands down. She was born in Kansas
City in nine. She graduated from Wilbur Forest University in
nine and after working as a math teacher. Yet again
we have the teaching coming. First, she tired by Langley
(23:01):
Ine on the West Computers team, and in nineteen forty
nine she became the first black manager of the West
Computers and she was called the head Computer, which is
the coolest job title computer. Um. She was the first
black manager though of the West Computers at that time
(23:22):
because before then even the West Computers managers had all
been white women according to policy, right exactly, And so
this makes her the first black manager at NACA period,
and this granted her a much greater visibility and a
lot more opportunities for collaboration. She worked with other computers
(23:42):
on a handbook for algebraic methods and calculating machines. And
I know that, you know, when you get to talking
about managers, sometimes they can be jerks, but she was
not one of them. This was a beloved both mathematician
and manager because she advocated for the West Computers, but
she also intervened on behalf of women workers in general
(24:04):
when they deserved promotions. Are raises white or black. If
you worked hard and deserved to raise, Vaughan was going
to go to the map for you. And the engineers
valued her too. They took her personnel recommendations seriously, but
they often wanted her to be the one to work
on the more challenging work and calculations when they had
(24:26):
stuff to get done. They were like, oh, we really
appreciate to be you're recommending, Like, we we trust you
and we'll hire that person for this division, but could
you do it? Thanks? Dorothy uh In. NAKA transitions to NASA,
as we've mentioned, and the segregated facilities are shuttered. And
this is when Vaughan and many of the former West
(24:47):
computers are moved to electronic computing in the new Analysis
and Computation Division. When NASA gets the machine computeurs and
Vaughan continues her education, she becomes an expert in for Tran,
which is a computer programming language still in use today
(25:07):
for scientific computing. Oh and meanwhile she's also raising a
family and one of her children grow up to work
for NASA. Talk about awesome mom role model. I know,
I love it. I love that there's like a NASA
legacy in a family. It's just the family business, you know, NASA. UM.
And then the next one we want to talk about
(25:29):
is the amazing Catherine Johnson. She's the physicist and mathematician
who worked with both Man and Vaughan and who was
recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom UM. But she
she was drawn to math from an early age. She
would write later, math it's just there. You're either right
or you're wrong, and that's what I like about it.
And she also has told numerous interviewers that I counted everything,
(25:52):
the steps, the dishes, the stars in the sky, and
her family growing up was pretty poor. They were so
invested in Katherine and her siblings education and very encouraging
of them. Um. And in school, she was a math
prodigy and she was inspired by her geometry teacher, Miss Turner.
(26:15):
Shout out to teachers and again more mentorship. Um. And
she graduated from high school at fourteen. But listen, her
parents were so invested in Katherine and her schooling that
because there was no high school for black children in
her original hometown, her parents sent her in her siblings
(26:37):
to a lab school on the all black West Virginia
State Institute campus. Yeah. So I mean no small feet
that this woman graduated from high school at fourteen. Yeah.
And then she graduated from college with degrees in math
and French at eighteen. In French, the brain is an
amazing thing, especially when it belongs to Katherine Johnson. Well,
(26:58):
and she even had more men tourship. In college. She
was taught by Dr William W. Chefflin Claytor, who spotted
her potential as a research mathematician, and he would go
on to to achieve a degree of fame for his
own research, And so I mean that reflects so amazingly
on Catherine that she has this person helping guide her
(27:19):
through her research. But in nineteen thirty nine, she was
actually one of three black students selected to integrate West
Virginia University's grad program. And she stayed just a year
before getting married and starting a family. And there's a
while here where she is raising her kids, she's teaching.
(27:41):
But then in nineteen fifty three, she ends up taking
a computer job at Langley because the year before her
husband had fallen ill and she needed to get back
to work. She had taken time off from teaching math,
French and music. So she gets in at Langley because
of naka's recruitment efforts for its Guidance and Navigation department.
(28:04):
And the first year though that she applied, they had
already filled their quota. So she reapplied the next year
and got in. So lesson learned if at first you
do not get the job, you can always reapply. Yeah,
especially if you get to work under Dorothy Vaughan like
she did. Yeah, And we're so lucky that Katherine Johnson reapplied,
(28:25):
because I mean, just weeks after she started in the
computer pool. She starts to just start asking questions about, Wait,
why are all of the people on the research team guys, Wait,
why aren't any of the women computers invited to these meetings?
Is there a policy or law against me not being
allowed to be here? No, okay, I'm just gonna be here.
(28:46):
I'm gonna ask a lot of questions. Yeah, it's amazing.
She She credits this habit of incessantly asking questions with
being asked to fill in on the all Dude flight
research team. She got to research airplane gust alleviation and
wake turbulence. And in nineteen fifty eight she moves from
(29:08):
the flight Mechanics branch to the spacecraft Controls branch, whose
job it was to get men into space like a SAP.
And it's in that space research division where she seriously
makes her mark and she doesn't waste any time. In
nineteen sixty she becomes the Flight Research Division's first credited
female author when she co authors a report with equations
(29:30):
that describe the trajectories for placing the manned mercury capsule
into low Earth orbit and bringing it back safely. And
then in nineteen sixty one she calculated the trajectory that
put the first American Alan shepherd into space. How am
I thirty one and just learning this incredible women's history fact.
(29:51):
Caroline Well, and I love that she has no lack
of confidence When she's looking back on this in two
thousand eight, she tells an inner you are the early
trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict
where it would be at any point. Early on, when
they said they wanted the capsule to come down at
a certain place, they were trying to compute when it
should start, I said, let me do it. I just
(30:13):
like to imagine that that was her being like, oh,
for God's sake, she says, you tell me when you
want it and where you want it to land, and
I'll do it backwards and I'll tell you when to
take off. That was my forte. What a smooth operator.
Just be confident like Catherine so confident in nineteen sixty two,
despite the fact that actual computer machines by this point
(30:37):
we're being used to perform calculations. When it was John
Glenn's turn to go into space and orbit the Earth
in m A six, he specifically asked Johnson to run
the numbers against what the computer had come up with,
so in his pre flight checklist he had quote, have
the girl double check the numbers. Yeah, and she said
(30:59):
that it was very nervous, but I knew that my
calculations were correct, and they were so over an ounce
of Catherine's confidence. Uh. And in the mid sixties she
worked on trajectories for the Lunar Orbiter program, which mapped
the Moon's surface before the nineteen sixty nine moon landing,
speaking of which, in nineteen she calculated the trajectory for
(31:23):
the Apollo eleven flight to the Moon. And it doesn't
stop there. In seventy she collaborated on the backup calculation
that brought Apollo thirteen astronauts home safely. So it is
little wonder then that she was awarded the highest civilian
honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November. And
(31:45):
there's so many other women at NAKA slash NASA slash
Langley to mention, but so little has been known about
them all these years. And that's actually something that hidden
Figures author Margot Lee shudderly is working to rectify. She
has teamed up with McAlister College researchers Duchess Harris, who
(32:08):
is the granddaughter of Miriam Daniel Man, one of the
first computers, and Lucy Short on what's called the Human
Computer Project, which is their digital effort to document the
lives and work of women who worked as computers at Langley.
And so there, I mean, there are names that we
(32:30):
know that I just wasn't able to find enough information about,
women like Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith, and the very prolific
writer and researcher Barbara Holly. All I know is her name,
and I know that she researched a lot of stuff
that my brain can barely comprehend um, But I just
don't have that much background. One of those women also
(32:52):
is Katherine Pedrew, who graduated from Storer College in ninety
three with a chemistry degree and went to work for
naka A imediately. She retired in nineteen six, and she
was involved in research on balance in the Instrument Research Division.
And that's about as much as I could find on Catherine. Well,
and we have more information on women who worked at
(33:14):
NASA in more recent years. Relatively, there's Melbo Roy Mountain,
who was Howard University alum. She earned a master's in math,
who became Assistant Chief of Research Programs at NASA's Trajectory
and Geodynamics Division in the nineteen sixties. And she I
mean at this point to consider how revolutionary it is
(33:37):
that she's the head of a team and not so
long ago you have Miriam Daniel Man taking down the
colored sign from the cafeteria spunk like. So, Mountain leads
a team of mathematicians who did the intense computational work
of launching and tracking echo satellites in Earth's orbit, and
(33:59):
Mountain help a lot of impressive jobs during her time
at NASA. In she was promoted to head programmer in
charge of the team that determined aircraft orbits in space.
She actually designed computer programs to predict trajectories and aircraft
locations before transitioning into the job that Kristen was talking about,
(34:20):
that assistant chief of Research Programs. And finally, we're going
to circle back to a name that you mentioned early
in the episode, Caroline Christine man Darden, who was the
first black woman at NASA Langley to be promoted into
senior executive service. And her bio is fantastic as well,
because going back to childhood, her interests in math was
(34:44):
sparked exploring how bikes and cars worked with her dad
rad dad alert. And here's another case of a kid
whose parents really valued her education. They ended up sending
her to a boarding school in Asheville, where a geometry
teacher he her fall in love with the subject, just
like Miss Turner. Katherine Johnson's geometry teacher. Yes, so important.
(35:09):
I like geometry too, and I hope they are geometry
teachers listening who feel very special right now. I also
loved geometry. That was my favorite math in high school.
I liked now. Granted, I literally was tutored in math
from the time I was in sixth grade to twelfth
grade because I am a word person. That's just how
it shook out. Um. But I really liked Algebran geometry,
(35:30):
Physics not so much, and chemistry I barely passed. So
I am impressed from all these women, to say the least. Um.
But in nineteen sixty two, Christine graduates from Hampton Institute
with a bachelor's in math education in a minor in
physics at just twenty, and she starts teaching. Because the
whole thing that she talks about in that interview, I
(35:53):
watched which I encourage you to google. Is that her
father was so concerned about his daughter not having a job,
and so he did what a lot of parents do,
and he's like, UM, I know, you have this one
interest which is cool, and that's math and that's awesome. However,
can you please major in something that will actually let
you get hired after college. So he strongly, strongly, strongly
(36:17):
encouraged his daughter to major in education because, as she
points out in the interview, like you know, they're just there.
Still weren't a ton of jobs open, like high paying
jobs and secure jobs open to women at the time.
So she's like, I, as much as I loved math,
I had to be prepared to do whatever I could
to make a living and helps for my family. And
(36:38):
so she does teach for a while. But in the meantime,
as she's teaching and still going to school, she's participating
in lunch counter sit in so she's participating in the
civil rights movement at the same time that she's you know,
pursuing math and eventually gonna shoot to NASA like a
rocket ship pocket ship up of awesome. So in nineteen
(37:02):
sixties seven, after studying physics and math at Virginia State College.
She earns her masters and math, and she's hired for
the Langley computer pool. But she is not going to
remain in that pool. She needs to cannonball into the
deep end. So in the seventies, as computers like machine
(37:23):
computers like we think of today, we're starting to become
a thing. Darten was one of the first to work
on developing computer programs because she'd studied programming in her masters,
so she began researching also Sonic Boom minimization, and after
five years in computing and programming support, she I mean
(37:45):
she just felt limited. She didn't feel like she had
enough knowledge of everything that she was working on, and
also she hadn't gotten promoted, so she was she was
getting a little anxious to do some new stuff. Yeah,
So in nineteen seven any two, she complains to the
section head about men who were coming in with similar
(38:05):
credentials but getting more opportunities for advancement. I mean, this
is the same kind of thing that we're hearing from
the very get go of women being hired first at
NAKA and then at NASA. So he transfers her to
Sonic Boom Research, like like you do well and I
think that she had even suggested to him because she
had started doing sonic boom research on her own, that
(38:27):
that's the direction that she should go in. And her
career path also echoes Katherine Johnson in the sense of
speaking up, calling attention to what you know and what
you would be good at, incessant questioning very important. Uh
In she earns a PhD in engineering and becomes one
(38:47):
of NASA's foremost experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms.
And one of the most endearing things about Johnson and
Darden's ten years at NASA is how they were not
only invested in their nine to five work, but also
in outreach and encouraging girls, in particular to get into
(39:08):
STEM like they did. Yeah, work that is so important,
and I mean, yes, the NASA work is important, but
that outreach work and providing visible role models to children
is so important, and that is something that NASA itself
has highlighted. They put out a report in um that
looked at data stretching from two thousand eight to twelve
that found that women of color make up just five
(39:31):
and a half percent of aerospace tech engineers, and they
linked this to quote inherent biases and stereotyping that exists
for women of color in the science and engineering workplace.
In addition, they write, there are challenges related to the
lack of mentorship and isolation, and so they strongly encourage
(39:52):
in this this report those same outreach efforts, but in
an official capacity. So, yes, it's so important to have
these visible figure is like Johnson and like Darden. But
now the this NASA report is saying, we have to
continue our efforts to create a pipeline. In the same
way that having Langley next door to Hampton created a
(40:13):
you know, a figurative pipeline of people geniuses to Langley.
NASA still needs to continue to do that kind of
work of encouraging boys and girls, but in this case
women of color to join their ranks and be among
their researchers. Yeah. I mean, one astounding statistic is that
(40:33):
there are around one hundred black female physicists in the US. Well, yeah,
so it's not just an issue at NASA. I mean
this is across the board um in the US and
likely abroad as well, although there are countries that are
far better in terms of gender equity in stem fields.
(40:57):
But now we're curious to know who your stem heroines are,
and especially the unsung ones, because as you can probably tell,
it really excites Caroline and me to learn about new
not new, but women we should have known about a
long time ago. We were doing all sorts of trailblazing
and brainpowering. Yeah, so I encourage all of you. If
(41:22):
you're at school or at work and you're starting to
doubt yourself, I want you to ask yourself, what would
Katherine Johnson do? She knew who she was, she knew
what she was good at, and she was not going
to stop asking questions or counting or counting, just counted everything. Well, Listeners,
you can email us mom Stuff at house stuff works
(41:44):
dot com, or you can also tweet us your thoughts
at mom Stuff Podcast, or send us a message on Facebook.
And we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. I have a letter here from Sarah
in response to our abortion episodes. She says, I love
(42:07):
the show and love that you ladies are so vocally
supportive of a woman's right to have an abortion if
she wishes. However, there seems to be this narrative of
the good abortion, and more specifically, the hard decision abortion
that I find frustrating. Yes, there are many women for
whom choosing to have an abortion is stressful, emotional, and
heart wrenching, but there are just as many women for
whom it is a no brainer decision. When I found
(42:30):
out I was pregnant at twenty one, I didn't even
have to think twice before calling an abortion clinic and
making an appointment. I have been using contraception because I
was not ready to have a child, and I had
always known that I would abort in the case of
an unplanned pregnancy. I feel like there is a cultural
perception of the good abortion, and it includes handwringing with
a long term boyfriend or a high stakes job or
(42:51):
a traumatic situation, and that simply isn't always the case.
Women should feel free and empowered to have an abortion
simply because they don't want to be pregnant, which I'm
sure you already know, so thank you, Sarah. Well. I've
got a letter here from Sierra about psychic women line
of employment far different than the NASA work we were
(43:11):
talking about in today's episode, but she writes about how
she briefly worked as a phone psychic when she was
having some trouble finding steadier employment, and she says you
would collect as much personal information from the collar as
you could before launching into the reading in order to
give your psychic forecast some degree of believable, very similitude,
(43:35):
and this may speak to why so many psychics are women.
The people who are in the company I worked for
were of the opinion that women were better at teasing
out the nuggets of personal intel that were so crucial
to creating a believable psychic experience. My collars were pretty
evenly split between men and women, but both groups seemed
more willing to open up to a female psychic and
(43:55):
divulge personal details without suspicion that I could then work
into my re eatings. I had a male roommate at
the time who worked at the same company, and he
had a harder time with callers getting aggressive when he
asked personal questions. I didn't work as a phone psychic
for long because it was a very sad job. I
knew I had no psychic abilities, and most people who
called were in desperate situations and just looking for someone
(44:17):
to tell them it would be okay. I felt terrible
about the fact that they were paying three dollars a
minute to get support during some of the darkest times
of their lives, and the company's only directive to me
was to keep callers on the line for as long
as possible. I also felt exploited because it's emotionally draining
to listen to the sad stories of strangers and concoct
b s designed only to fleece them out of money,
(44:38):
and I was only being paid twenty cents a minute.
The emotional labor the job demanded, combined with a lack
of financial security, was just too much and I quit
after a few months. I love the show well. Thanks
Sierra for sharing your experiences with us and now listeners,
we want to hear what's on your minds Mom. Stuff
(44:59):
at how so works dot com is our email address
and for links all of our social media as well
as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts with our
sources so you can learn more about the incredible women
of color who worked at NAKA and NASA. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
(45:23):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
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