Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  The prediction that the end of the war would send Hampton Roads into an economic downturn proved incorrect. The place Dorothy Vaughan now called home was on the cusp of a defense industry boom that would be measured not in years but in decades. After the war, the Norfolk Naval Base confirmed its command of the Atlantic Fleet and was appointed the headquarters of the navy’s air command. Added to the local military installations and contractors were the Army Transportation School, set up at Fort Eustis in Newport News, and the US Coast Guard base in Portsmouth, with the Newport News shipyard and the naval shipyard in Portsmouth still going strong. In 1946, the army decided to make Langley Field the headquarters of its Tactical Air Command, one of the major commands of the US Army Air Corps. One year later, the importance of the airplane to US defense was underscored when the Army Air Corps was elevated to the status of an independent branch of the military: the United States Air Force.

  The defense establishment’s grip on the economy of southeastern Virginia had become so strong during the war, its influence so critical to the material well-being of the local residents, that just as Hampton Roads was once the very model of the war boomtown, so too had it become a warfare state, dependent on the defense industry dollars that lapped into the region like waves on the shores of its beaches. Hampton Roads had become the embodiment of what Cold War president Dwight D. Eisenhower would a decade later dub the “military-industrial complex.”

  The inevitable reduction in force that visited Langley—the staff had peaked at more than three thousand employees just before V-J Day—was short-lived and shallow, mostly accomplished through the natural attrition of those who decided it was time to move on from their life at Langley. Many computers and other female employees at the laboratory exchanged the daily routine of office life for a full-time position at home. No small number of them married the men they worked with; the laboratory’s success as a matchmaking service rivaled its research prowess. The employee newsletter Air Scoop was replete with tales of the sparkler spotted on the ring finger of this bachelorette in the personnel department or the happy ending for that starry-eyed couple who found true love over model tests in the Free-Flight Tunnel.

  A steady stream of “heir mail” announcements ensued. Disability or accumulated sick leave were available to expectant mothers who wanted to return to work when their children were old enough to be left in the care of someone else during the day, though how easily this was done depended on the disposition of their managers. Many women tendered their resignations during their pregnancies and reapplied to the laboratory when they were ready to work again, hoping they would find a way to wrangle back their old jobs.

  But talented computers, particularly those with years of experience, were valuable resources. The ink was barely dry on the bulletin in Air Scoop announcing the reduction in force before Melvin Butler released a plan to offer permanent appointments to war service employees. Some top-ranked managers went out of their way to keep the most productive women on the job by giving them the flexibility they needed to take care of their families.

  In three years at Langley, Dorothy Vaughan had proven to be more than equal to the job, handing off error-free work to Marge Hannah and Blanche Sponsler and managing the constant deadlines with ease, garnering “excellent” ratings from her bosses. During the war, Dorothy and two other colleagues, Ida Bassette, a Hampton native (cousin to West Computing’s Pearl Bassette), and Dorothy Hoover, originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, had been appointed shift supervisors, each managing one-third of a group that had swelled to twenty-five women. At the war’s peak, when the laboratory operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule, Dorothy often worked the 3:00 p.m.-to-11:00 p.m. shift, responsible for eight computers’ work calculating data sheets, reading film, and plotting numbers. Perhaps it was no surprise that Dorothy was a keeper, but it must have come as a relief when, in 1946, she was made a permanent Civil Service employee.

  Nearly to a woman, the West Computers had decided they were going to hold on to their seats, whatever it took. The section had outgrown its original room in the Warehouse Building, and in 1945, the group moved into “two spacious offices” on the first floor of the West Side’s newly built Aircraft Loads Division building.

  Black or white, east or west, single or married, mothers or childless, women were now a fundamental part of the aeronautical research process. Not a year after the end of the war, the familiar announcements of vacancies at the laboratory, including openings for computers, began to appear in the newsletter again. As the United States downshifted from a flat-out sprint to victory to a more measured pace of economic activity, and as the laboratory began to forget that it had ever operated without the female computers, Dorothy had time to pause and give consideration to what a long-term career as a mathematician might look like. How could she entertain the idea of returning to Farmville and giving up a job she was good at, that she enjoyed, that paid two or three times more than teaching? Working as a research mathematician at Langley was a very, very good black job—and it was also a very, very good female job. The state of the aeronautics industry was strong, and the engineers were just as interested in retaining the services of the women who did the calculations as the aircraft manufacturers had been in keeping the laundry workers who supported their factory workers on the job.

  Thousands of women around the country had taken computing jobs during the war: at Langley; at the NACA’s other laboratories (the Ames Research Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, which the agency had founded in 1939, and the Flight Propulsion Research facility in Cleveland, inaugurated in 1941); at the army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, run by the California Institute of Technology; at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC; at the University of Pennsylvania’s secret ballistic research laboratory; and at aircraft companies like Curtiss Wright, which called the women “Cadettes.” A new future stretched out before them, but Dorothy Vaughan and the others found themselves at the beginning of a career, with few role models to follow to its end. Just as they had learned the techniques of aeronautical research on the job, the ambitious among them would have to figure out for themselves what it would take to advance as a woman in a profession that was built by men.

  Renowned aerodynamicists Eastman Jacobs, John Stack, and John Becker had come to the laboratory as freshly minted junior engineers and were quickly allowed to design and conduct their own experiments. R. T. Jones, the engineer who had intervened on behalf of the black man with the Hampton police, had beguiled Langley managers immediately with his facile mind. Jones never finished college, so when he was hired in 1934, it was as a subprofessional scientific aide, the category that most women fell into. Despite good performance reviews, a P-1 rating was out of his reach, because the grade required a bachelor’s degree. So his managers conspired to skip him ahead to a P-2, which, by the arcane rules of bureaucracy, didn’t have the same requirement.

  Seasoned researchers took the male upstarts under their wings, initiating them into their guild over lunchtime conversations in the cafeteria and in after-hours men-only smokers. The most promising of the acolytes were tapped to assist their managers in the operations of the laboratory’s valuable tunnels and research facilities, apprenticeships that could open the door to high-profile research assignments and eventual promotion to the head of a section, branch, or division. By the end of the 1930s, R. T. Jones had been promoted to head the Stability Analysis section, an influential redoubt of the “no-air” engineers, which used theoretical math rather than wind-tunnel experiments or flight tests to understand how to improve aircraft performance.

  Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations. A woman who worked in the central computing pools was one step removed from the research, and the engineers’ assignments sometimes lacked the context to give the computer much knowledge about the afterlife of the numbers that bedeviled her days. She might spend weeks calculating a pressure distribution
without knowing what kind of plane was being tested or whether the analysis that depended on her math had resulted in significant conclusions. The work of most of the women, like that of the Friden, Marchant, or Monroe computing machines they used, was anonymous. Even a woman who had worked closely with an engineer on the content of a research report was rarely rewarded by seeing her name alongside his on the final publication. Why would the computers have the same desire for recognition that they did? many engineers figured. They were women, after all.

  As the computers’ work grew in scope and importance, however, a girl who impressed engineers with her mathematical prowess might be invited to join them working full-time for their tunnel or group. More groups meant more opportunities for women to get closer to the research and establish their bona fides. Computing pools attached to specific tunnels or branches grew larger, spawned their own supervisors, and gave the female professionals the opportunity to specialize in a particular subfield of aeronautics. A computer who could process data on the spot and understand how to interpret it was more valuable to the team than a pool computer with more general knowledge. That kind of specialization would be the key to managing the increasingly complex nature of aeronautical research in the postwar era. Freed from the wartime imperative of drag cleanup—the process of refining existing planes to eke out small improvements in their performance—the aerodynamicists turned their attentions to an enemy more difficult to defeat than the Axis forces: the speed of sound.

  The development of the turbojet engine in the early 1940s meant that Langley engineers finally had a powerful enough propulsion system to make their high-speed wing concepts, like R. T. Jones’s swept-back delta wings, which were angled backward like the wings of a swift—a high-flying bird—really fly. Langley added state-of-the-art facilities on the West Side like the seven-by-ten-foot High-Speed Tunnel and the four-by-four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, machines that could blast models with winds that approached or exceeded the mysterious speed of sound. The NACA empire also continued the course of its westward expansion, building up its staff and facilities at the Cleveland and Ames laboratories.

  In 1947, a party of thirteen Langley employees, including two former East Computers, was sent to the Mojave Desert to establish the Dryden High-Speed Flight Research Center, a direct assault on the problems of faster-than-sound flight. The speed of sound, about 761 miles per hour at sea level in dry air at 59 degrees Fahrenheit, varied depending on temperature, altitude, and humidity. It was long thought to be a physical limit on the maximum speed of an object moving through the air. As an airplane flying at sea level in dry air approached Mach 1, or 100 percent of the local speed of sound, air molecules in front of the flying plane piled up and compressed, forming a shock wave, the same phenomenon that caused the noise associated with the crack of a bull whip or the firing of a bullet.

  Some scientists speculated that if a pilot succeeded in pushing his plane through the sound barrier, either the plane or the pilot or both would disintegrate from the force of the shock waves. But on October 14, 1947, pilot Chuck Yeager, flying over the Mojave Desert in an NACA-developed experimental research plane called the Bell X-1, pierced the sound barrier for the first time in history, a fact that was corroborated by the female computers on the ground who analyzed the data that came from the instruments on Yeager’s plane.

  There were too few women at Muroc to warrant sending them off into a separate section. In the isolation of the desert, in close working conditions at a bare-bones facility with ramshackle dormitories, the Muroc computers stepped easily into the role of junior engineers. Upward mobility was more difficult to achieve in the larger, more bureaucratic operation at Mother Langley, with a well-developed management structure. Even there, however, a few pioneers were managing to clear a path of sorts for other women to follow. Mathematician Doris Cohen, a native New Yorker who started working at the laboratory in the late 1930s, was for many years the NACA’s lone female author. Not even Pearl Young, the NACA’s first female engineer and the founder of the agency’s rigorous editorial review process, left behind research with her name on it.

  From 1941 through 1945, Doris Cohen published nine reports documenting experiments conducted at the frontier of high-speed aeronautical research, five as the sole author, and four coauthored with R. T. Jones (whom she would eventually marry). It was the kind of prodigious output that even aspiring male engineers could only hope to replicate. Getting one’s name on a research report was a necessary first step in the career of an engineer. For a woman, it was a significant and unusual achievement. It provided public acknowledgment that she had contributed to a worthy line of inquiry and inked her fingerprints onto findings that would be circulated widely among the aeronautical community. Authors of a report were identified as important members of a team; proximity to the work was everything. As more of the women in the computing pools transferred to engineering groups—and as new computers were hired into sections from their first day of work, without serving time in the pools—it gave the women the chance to move away from “working the machines” and rote plotting and to get closer to the research report, which was the laboratory’s most important product.

  The strongest evidence of the progress Langley’s women were making in the early postwar years came when one of its most visible female professionals reached the end of the road. Over the course of twelve years, Virginia Tucker had ascended from a subprofessional employee to the most powerful woman at the lab. She had done much to transform the position of computer from a proto-clerical job into one of the laboratory’s most valuable assets. Her relentless recruitment efforts at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina—in 1949, the largest all-female college in America—and other all-female schools had given hundreds of educated women a shot at a mathematics career. All of the agency’s computing staffs, at Langley, Cleveland, Ames, and Muroc, traced their lineage back to the first pool, and to Tucker’s labor as the first female computer supervisor. Between 1942 and 1946, four hundred Langley computers received training on Tucker’s watch.

  The East Computing of the war years, a section with so many employees that the women had been forced to set up in hallways or closets or anywhere that could accommodate them, now fell victim to its own success. Veteran East Computers left for permanent assignments in the tunnels, and no new girls were hired into the pool to replace them. The core group, which had been housed in an office in the Nineteen-foot Pressure Tunnel on the East Side, dwindled away. Girls now reported directly to their engineers or to the computer supervisors attached to the group. Virginia Tucker was a respected manager, but unlike Doris Cohen, she hadn’t pursued the researcher’s path and had no research credit to her name. She held a senior position for a woman but found herself without an obvious next step at Langley. In 1947, the laboratory disbanded East Computing, rerouting all open assignments to West Computing. Virginia Tucker, too, decided to head west. She accepted a job at the Northrop Corporation, one of many aviation companies tucked into the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. The company hired her as an engineer.

  While the East Computers had flowed out of their office and into the larger operations of the laboratory like a river, segregation kept the outmigration of West Computing to a trickle. When three West Computers made the leap in the late 1940s to Cascade Aerodynamics, a group that studied the aerodynamics of propellers, turbines, and other rotating bodies, it caused a commotion. Many white laboratory employees, particularly on the East Side, hadn’t even known that an all-black computing group existed. A conservative minority saw the mathematical race mixing as the twilight of their civilization. But the West Computers’ competence silenced most of the dissent; up close, it was difficult to object to good educations and mild middle-class manners, even if they came wrapped in brown skin.

  It was inevitable that one of the black women would get a shot at a research job. Dorothy Hoover—West Computing’s other Dorothy, one of the three shift supervisors—had earned an undergradu
ate degree in math from Arkansas AM&N, a black college that had been active in the World War II ESMWT training programs. She knocked off a master’s degree in mathematics from Atlanta University, and then taught school in Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee before coming to Langley in 1943, where she was hired as a P-1 mathematician. Like Doris Cohen, Dorothy Hoover was exceptionally fluent in abstract mathematical concepts and complex equations, and Marge Hannah channeled the rigorous mathematical assignments that came to the group from R. T. Jones’ Stability Analysis Section to Hoover. The engineers provided Hoover with long equations defining the relationships between wing shape and aerodynamic performance and instructed her to substitute into them other equations, formulas, and variables. Only when the series of equations had been sufficiently reduced would she start the process of inputting values and coming up with numbers using the calculating machines.

  The Stability Analysis fellows were as well known for their progressive politics as for their sharp minds. Many of them were Jewish, from the North. Jones, his wife, Doris Cohen, along with Sam Katzoff and Eastman Jacobs, who were two of the laboratory’s most respected analysts, and a white economics professor at Hampton Institute named Sam Rosenberg often convened at the home of Langley researcher Arthur Kantrowitz, where they spent evenings listening to classical music and discussing politics. They went to see movies at the Hampton Institute theater, comfortably mingling at the Negro school. More than most, they were open to breaking the color barrier by integrating a West Computer into their group. As a talented, possibly gifted mathematician with a similarly independent mind, Dorothy Hoover was a perfect fit for the section, and in 1946 R. T. Jones invited her to work directly for him.