Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  Katherine Goble certainly acknowledged the value of those three rationales, but for her, it was the one listed on the first page of the brochure that resonated most: humans pined to go into space because of their longing to know what lay beyond the confines of their own small world; they desired to leave Earth out of a compelling urge to go where no human had gone before. Katherine had always been driven by curiosity, and as the activity in and around Building 1244 crescendoed, it consumed her. Eisenhower’s brochure put forth a vague, practically useless timetable for when the United States might be expected to achieve a variety of objectives in space: “Early,” “Later,” “Still Later,” “And Much Later Still.” The real schedule—and no one knew this better than the people in Building 1244—was As Soon As Humanly Possible. When America should venture beyond the confines of Earth was just as obvious as why. But how? That was what Katherine Goble ached to know.

  She was far from alone. The plan for planting the American flag in the heavens, and the decision regarding who would lead the charge, was the table topic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, at Wernher von Braun’s Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Alabama, and at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. Officials gathered around conference tables at the NACA headquarters and at each of the NACA laboratories, concerned with plotting the quickest possible path into space. Nowhere vibrated with more anticipation than Langley. Katherine Johnson’s deskmates—John Mayer, Ted Skopinski, Alton Mayo, Harold “Al” Hamer, Carl Huss—moved from one meeting to another, conferring with each other, with their bosses, with representatives of aircraft manufacturers and military services, turning to every possible source in order to aggregate intelligence for the still inchoate endeavor.

  The only real reference that the Langley brain busters could lay their hands on was Introduction to Celestial Mechanics, a 1914 textbook by Forest Ray Moulton. So the engineers, who knew more about flying vehicles than any others, began scaling the next learning curve. Katherine’s branch chief, Henry Pearson, organized a “self-education” lecture series that began in February 1958 and lasted through May, drafting individual engineers in Flight Research and PARD to present on one of seventeen topics related to space technology. Even in the early, confusing months after Sputnik, the top engineers in those divisions, with decades of experience in flight-test research (and many with a not-so-secret love of science fiction) sensed that they were on the cusp of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They threw themselves into the class. John Mayer tackled orbital mechanics, Al Hamer lectured on rocket propulsion, and Alton Mayo handled reentry, the problems faced by an object returning to Earth. Carl Huss taught the physics of the solar system. Ted Skopinski was the trajectories guy, elaborating on the math describing the path taken by a space vehicle as it left Earth’s surface and settled into orbit around it.

  Katherine Goble had fallen in love with her job at Langley virtually the moment she walked through the door of West Computing. The four years she had spent doing monotonous calculations on gust alleviation had only intensified the desire to drain every drop of knowledge she could from the engineers she worked with. With the transmutation of her division’s priorities from aeronautics to space, however, her work was taking a particularly toothsome turn. Massaging the Monroe calculator and filling out the data sheets, which grew longer and wider as the work became more intricate, would still be part of her daily duties. But the engineers in the group now assigned her the job of preparing the charts and equations for the well-received space technology lectures. It was like a bell sounding, taking her back to the course on the analytic geometry of space that Dr. Claytor had created for her. Claytor’s demanding, rapid-fire instruction had laid the foundation both for the content of the work at hand and for its intensity. That preparation was critical as she put the abstract three-dimensional Cartesian plane to use in the service of the space technology lectures, which were eventually compiled in written form. It was the textbook of space the place, being written in real time.

  Katherine listened carefully to everything the engineers said, strained for snippets of conversation, and devoured Aviation Week like a kid reading the funny papers. The real action, she knew, was taking place there in the lectures and editorial meetings, those closed-door sessions where engineers subjected preliminary research reports to the same relentless scrutiny and stress testing that they applied to the aircraft they engineered. Her interest in the proceedings of the meetings increased in direct proportion to her proximity to them. By the measure of the rest of the country, she was an insider’s insider. She enjoyed a front-row seat at a spectacle that the rest of the citizenry learned about in the daily newspaper and on the nightly news. But however close she sat to the room where the meetings took place, she was still an outsider if she couldn’t get in the door.

  Building an airplane was nothing compared to shepherding research through Langley’s grueling review process. “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it”—that was the Langley way. The author of a NACA document—a technical report was the most comprehensive and exacting, a technical memorandum slightly less formal—faced a firing squad of four or five people, chosen for their expertise in the topic. After a presentation of findings, the committee, which had read and analyzed the report in advance, let loose a barrage of questions and comments. The committee was brusque, thorough, and relentless in rooting out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, incomprehensible statements, and illogical conclusions obscured by technical gibberish. And that was before subjecting the report to the style, clarity, grammar, and presentation standards that were Pearl Young’s legacy, before the addition of the charts and fancy graphics that reduced the data sheet to a coherent, visually persuasive point. A final report might be months, even years, in the making.

  Katherine sat down with the engineers to review the requirements for the space technology lectures and the research reports that were starting to come out of the process. She listened closely to their instructions and, as was her habit, she asked questions. Not just questions designed to clarify the marching orders she had been given, but the kind of queries she had fired at her parents and teachers as a child, meant to broaden and deepen her understanding of how things work so she could create a more refined model of the world. Why did the trajectory equation need to account for the oblateness of Earth? Why was it necessary to calculate an error ellipsoid to accurately predict the satellite’s return to the planet’s surface?

  She had asked plenty of questions when the scope of her work had extended only from the nose cone of a tiny Cessna 405 to its tail fin. Now there was so much more to ask, so much more to understand, and because it was all new, she felt like she was right there on the learning curve with the engineers. As the work intensified, something that had been hibernating in her mind awakened, and once roused it would not go away. She considered the issue and checked its logic, just as she did with her analytical work. At first she asked it only of herself, but eventually she came to the engineers with the question.

  “Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” she asked the engineers. A postgame recap of the analysis wasn’t nearly as thrilling as being there for the main event. How could she not want to be a part of the discussion? They were her numbers, after all.

  “Girls don’t go to the meetings,” Katherine’s male colleagues told her.

  “Is there a law against it?” Katherine retorted. There wasn’t, in fact. There were laws telling her where she might answer nature’s call—a law she ignored at Langley—and which fountain to drink from. There were laws restricting her ability to apply for a credit card in her own name, because she was a woman. But no law applied to the editorial meeting. It wasn’t personal: it was just the way things had always been done, they told her.

  Restricting the computers from joining the editorial meetings wasn’t a rule: it was a rule of thumb. It was rooted in practice and widely implemented, but it did not apply without exception to every situation. Langley gave each division chief, and eve
ry branch head and section head below them on the ladder, a certain amount of leeway in the management of their groups. Whether or not a woman was promoted, if she was given a raise, if she had access to the smoky sessions where the future was being conceived and built, had much to do with the prejudices and predilections of the men she worked for.

  In 1959, six of Langley’s female employees—Lucille Coltrane, Jean Clark Keating, Katherine Cullie Speegle, Ruth Whitman, Emily Stephens Mueller, and Dorothy Lee—assembled around a table in a Langley office to sit for a group photo, their elegant, well-made suits amplifying the confidence in their gaze. “Women Scientists,” the photographer labeled the picture, though the particulars of the occasion would be lost to the passage of time. They had rated inclusion in the photograph because of some combination of rank, research contributions, and general esteem in the eyes of their bosses. Five out of the six women in the photo worked in PARD.

  One of the women in the photo, Dorothy Lee, had accepted a position as a computer in PARD in 1948, fresh out of Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia, just after East Computing was disbanded. When branch chief Maxime Faget’s secretary took off for a two-week honeymoon, Dorothy was asked to sub for her. She answered the phones and distributed the mail in addition to her regular duties, which at the time involved solving a triple integral for an engineer in the division. At the end of the two weeks, she had so impressed Faget with her math (not her secretarial skills, as she didn’t know how to type) that he invited her to become a permanent member of his branch, apprenticing her to men who showed her the ropes of aerodynamic heating. By 1959 she had authored one report, coauthored seven more, including one with Max Faget, and, like Mary Jackson, been promoted to engineer.

  Early in her career at Langley, Dorothy Lee was interviewed for the Daily Press, in all probability by Virginia Biggins, the female reporter assigned to the Langley beat. “Do you believe,” she was asked, “that women working with men have to think like a man, work like a dog, and act like a lady?” “Yes, I do,” Lee said, who was then mildly mortified to read her words in the Sunday paper.

  It was the “acting like a lady” term of the equation that was so vexing. A little bit of coyness, like wormwood, could be pleasantly intoxicating, smoothing interactions with the men. Too much politesse, however, might poison a woman’s prospects for advancement. Women were “supposed” to wait for the assignments from their supervisors, and weren’t expected to take the lead by asking questions or pushing for plum assignments. Men were engineers and women were computers; men did the analytical thinking and women did the calculations. Men gave the orders and women took notes. Unless an engineer was given a compelling reason to evaluate a woman as a peer, she remained in his blind spot, her usefulness measured against the limited task at hand, any additional talents undiscovered.

  Some women did indeed spend their days in rote service to the day’s task, plotting data with blithe indifference, routing torrents of numbers as nonchalantly as the calculating machines they cradled. But the average level of interest in the work among female employees was no lower than it was for their male counterparts, the “inveterate wind tunnel jockeys” and the mediocre “can’t-hack-it engineers” who managed to carve out a comfortable place for themselves in the bureaucracy despite modest talents or ambition. For the women who had found their true calling at the NACA, like Dorothy Lee, like Katherine Johnson, they woke up dreaming of angles of attack and two-body orbit equations and ablation processes no less than did Chris Kraft and Max Faget and Ted Skopinski. They matched their male colleagues in curiosity, passion, and the ability to withstand pressure. Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. First, however, they had to get over the high hurdle of low expectations.

  Whatever personal insecurities Katherine Goble might have had about being a woman working with men, or about being one of the few blacks in a white workplace, she managed to cast them aside when she came to work in the morning. The racism stuff, the woman stuff: she managed to tuck all that way in a place far from her core, where it would not damage her steely confidence. As far as Katherine was concerned—as far as she had decided—once they got to the office, “they were all the same.” She was going to assume that the smart fellas who sat across the desk, with whom she shared a telephone line and the occasional lunchtime game of bridge, felt the same. She only needed to break through their blind spots and make her case.

  “Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Katherine Goble asked again, undeterred by the initial demurral. She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer. Her requests were gentle but persistent, like the trickle of water that eventually forces its way through rock. The greatest adventure in the history of humankind was happening two desks away, and it would be a betrayal of her own self-confidence and of the judgment of everyone who had helped her to reach this point to not go the final distance. She asked early, she asked often, and she asked penetrating questions about the work. She asked with the highest respect for the natures of the brainy fellas she worked with, and she asked knowing that she was the right person for a task that needed the finest minds.

  As much as anything, she asked with confidence in the ultimate decision.

  “Let her go,” they finally said, exasperated. The engineers just got tired of saying no. Who were they, they must have figured, to stand in the way of someone so committed to making a contribution, so convinced of the quality of her contribution that she was willing to stand up to the men whose success—or failure—might tip the balance in the outcome of the Cold War?

  In 1958, Katherine Goble finally made it into the editorial meetings of the Guidance and Control Branch of Langley’s Flight Research Division, soon to be renamed the Aerospace Mechanics Division of the nearly-ready-for-prime-time National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now, she was going to come along with the program.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  With All Deliberate Speed

  1958 was a year no Langley employee would ever forget. Leaving work on September 30, they said good-bye to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the esoteric operation that for forty-three years had quietly supervised and directed the airpower revolution, good-bye to the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of yore. On the morning of October 1, the former NACAites walked into the Langley Research Center, epicenter of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a new American agency whose birth had been induced by a hurtling Soviet sphere. The buildings hadn’t changed, nor had the people, or, for many of them, the work they were charged with. But from sundown one day to sunup the next, they had gone, if only in the public imagination, from erudite and obscure to obvious and spectacular, from the crackpots of the airplane epoch of the 1940s to the guardians of the space-age 1960s.

  At the end of the 1950s, when the American space program looked as uncoordinated and spindly as a foal, predicting that the United States would best the Soviets might have seemed like a fool’s bet. NASA had other plans, creating a brain trust at Mother Langley called the Space Task Group, a nimble, semi-autonomous working group that drew largely from the Flight Research Division and PARD and was led by engineer Robert Gilruth. The Space Task Group set up shop on Langley’s East Side in some of the laboratory’s oldest buildings. Those space pilgrims, an initial group of forty-five people, gave the country’s first manned space program an operating plan and a name: Project Mercury. The venture had three goals: to orbit a named spacecraft around the Earth, to investigate man’s ability to function in space, and to recover both men and spacecraft safely.

  Virginians puffed out their chests with pride now that the good old brain busters were leading the charge against the Reds. An October 1959 open house at Langley held on the occasion of NASA’s first anniversary attracted twenty thousand ardent locals eager for an up-close look at the work of the unusual neighbors th
ey had underestimated and overlooked for decades. No longer just a “a dull bunch of gray buildings with gray people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards,” NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky. However, Virginia’s legacy as the birthplace of humanity’s first step into the heavens would have to compete with the notoriety it was gaining as the country’s most intransigent foe of integrated schools.

  “So far as the future histories of this state can be anticipated now, the year 1958 will be best known as the year Virginia closed the public schools,” lamented Lenoir Chambers, editor in chief of Virginia Beach’s Virginian-Pilot and a southern liberal in the mold of Mark Etheridge of the Louisville Post-Courier. Undeterred and unchastened by the 1957 showdown in Little Rock, the Byrd Machine’s Massive Resistance movement made good on its threat. In the fall of 1958, Virginia’s governor Lindsay Almond chained the doors of the schools in localities that attempted to comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Thirteen thousand students in the three cities that had moved forward with integration—Front Royal, Charlottesville, and Norfolk—found themselves sitting at home in the fall of 1958. “I would rather have my children live in ignorance than have them go to school with Negroes,” one white parent told a reporter. A total of ten thousand of the shut-out students lived in Norfolk: 5,500 of those from military families stationed at the naval base, white students as well as black paying the price for the state’s racial crusade.

  Across the water from Norfolk, on the peninsula that Langley called home, public schools remained open but segregated. Even as the barriers in their parents’ workplace continued to erode, the children of Langley’s black employees returned to their fall routines at Carver, Huntington, and Phenix, while their white colleagues’ children went back to Newport News High and Hampton High. In their new home in Mimosa Crescent, the Goble daughters were now zoned to attend Hampton High School. The school board, however, paid “school fees” to the families as an incentive for them to keep their children in the black district, similar to the out-of-state “scholarships” the state offered to black graduate students to keep them from integrating Virginia colleges.