And so, on a spring morning in March 1952, Janez confidently shook Macie’s hand. “I’m Janez Lawson,” she said, smiling warmly.
“Mrs. Roberts, supervisor of computing,” Macie said in her usual curt style. Instead of exchanging niceties, she dove right into her questions. “I see you’re graduating from UCLA?”
“That’s right. I’m receiving my bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. As part of the program I’ve taken every advanced mathematics course offered.”
“Have you used a Friden calculator before?”
“I’ve seen one, but we haven’t used them in class.” Janez hesitated before adding, “But I learn quickly.”
“Do you enjoy working with other women?”
“Well,” began Janez as she adjusted her words diplomatically, “there have been hardly any women in my classes at UCLA. I do love working with women, though. As president of my sorority I’ve organized many events with the girls in our house. Our winter balls are always highly regarded. Of course I’ve had my mother as a role model. She’s very active socially.”
Macie was impressed. Janez exuded confidence. The young woman had an air of maturity and competence. Macie was sure she would be an invaluable addition to their team. There was only one obstacle preventing her from hiring her on the spot: Janez was African-American.
For all its liberal attitudes and laid-back manner, California was undeniably segregated. Schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces were all delineated by race. With the postwar boom, African Americans were moving to Southern California, especially to Los Angeles, in increasing numbers. The city’s population rose from 75,000 in 1940 to roughly 250,000 in 1950. From all over the country, people were flocking to Southern California with visions of sunshine, beaches, and futures as movie stars. It was a land of dreamers. To accommodate the influx, developers bulldozed orange groves and replaced the lines of green and orange with rows of tract homes. Yet these new neighborhoods offered little diversity; African Americans were confined mostly to a few areas in the growing city. The Lawson family was part of a burgeoning community in Santa Monica.
The decision by JPL to hire Janez Lawson was not made lightly. She would be the first African American hired for a professional position at the institute. She was continuing a family legacy. Her father, Hillard Lawson, was the first African-American city council member in Santa Monica. Questions were raised, chief among them: How would the staff react to her? Macie was quick to answer for her girls, certain they would accept Janez as one of their own. The engineers, she was sure, could be similarly persuaded. Janez was hired.
As the group took their first steps toward racial integration, the pressures of the Cold War were also mounting. The design of the Corporal missile, at least in concept, was set, and thus JPL’s work on the project diminished. Now it was time to make the missile reliable. To do this, they turned over the project to a private contractor who would manufacture and test the rockets in consultation with JPL. The winning bidder was Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. While the company had yet to work on missiles, they offered the advantage of proximity, since their factory was based in Los Angeles. Yet from the beginning, the relationship between research institute and contractor was tense. Drawings delivered from JPL to Firestone were often frustratingly incomplete, while JPL lamented Firestone’s inconsistent quality and workmanship. The chaos wasn’t good for missile development. Sometimes the missile’s guidance system worked perfectly; other times it sent the giant rocket careening into the bushes. The engineers brought the kinks in the system to the computers, and they worked together to fix them.
Part of the problem was that the guidance system was merely a patchwork of existing technology left over from World War II. Although the engineers at JPL recognized that an all-inertial system—one in which the missile can correct its own course—was ideal, they had no time to build it. Their contract with the army meant they couldn’t waste time tinkering. Instead, the missile used a radio-command guidance system, an approach the Germans had experimented with during the war. Using radar and Doppler, they tracked the position and velocity of the missile and then kept it on course with a radio transmitter.
The hastily-thrown-together guidance system frequently failed. The computers joked that a light breeze was all it took to knock it over. Corporals were now rolling off the assembly line at Firestone, but the missile no longer felt like their baby. The lack of consistency in manufacturing brought frustration and disappointment. There was a growing desire at JPL to build their designs in-house, where they could control every aspect of development, but this wish wasn’t practical with weaponry. While they could build a handful of rockets themselves, they didn’t have the means to mass-produce them in the quantities needed for war.
While JPL struggled with their relationship with private contractors, they had also begun work on a new project: the Sergeant. The weapons system would have a more sophisticated guidance system, as well as improved accuracy and range, and because it would use compact cakes of solid fuel that fit inside the missile, it wouldn’t take a sixteen-mile convoy to get the rocket off the ground. It would be the most advanced missile system the world had ever seen. But the project was still a twinkle in JPL’s eye; it hadn’t yet been approved by the army. With American troops on the ground in Korea, however, it seemed inevitable that a powerful yet nimble weapon would be needed. The solution seemed to rest in a forgotten World War II engineering marvel.
In the 1930s, a group of scientists in Great Britain were getting desperate. War with Germany was imminent, and they needed to develop an anti-aircraft weapon, but they had limited materials to work with and almost no money. They designed a slim and simple two-inch rocket to launch at enemy aircraft, using the only materials available to them: thin steel pipes. The problem was that the flimsy outer casings of the rocket would melt away when exposed to the explosive combustion of the rocket engine. They needed a way to insulate the delicate casing from the core of the motor.
Harold James Pool, a chemist with the reaction group at the British Woolwich Royal Arsenal, came up with an elegant solution. He invented a structure hidden within the rocket: a beautiful five-pointed star. From the outside it looked like any missile, but the solid propellant inside had a star shape carved lengthwise out of its center. The space between the propellant and the outer casing was filled with an insulating seal. The star protected the outer casing from the high heat of the motor but had other important advantages. Because combustion was contained within the star, it kept the rate at which the fuel burned constant. The rocket was thrust into the air with a more powerful and consistent acceleration than ever before. But problems arose. The scientists’ rudimentary fuel, the only one available, leaked into the seal, causing their rockets to deteriorate from the inside out. With no feasible solution, Pool and his team abandoned the burning star.
Although it was no longer practical, Pool could not let go of his brainchild, convinced it was the ideal design for rockets. He drew it from all angles, trying three-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-pointed stars. He believed the star would give the rocket a consistent burn, which could yield a steady thrust and lend the rocket exceptional power. But it was all numbers on a page. With the pressures of war on Great Britain, the government had no funds to experiment with the design. As World War II came to a close, Pool’s ideas made their way to the United States. An appendix attached to a memorandum sent to JPL in late 1945 described the star shape and contained a few equations. Intrigued, the group at JPL began playing with the design in the late 1940s.
The computers and engineers worked together to fix the technical problems. Not inhibited by the limited resources of wartime, the team found the solution easily. The difficulty seemed to be rooted in the leaky materials. To solve this they could simply bond the star propellant directly to the case and use a different propellant material not likely to be as troublesome. The designs, on paper at least, were flawless.
Rocket motor showing the internal star propellant
(Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)
But once the numbers came off the page, things started to fall apart. The first time the Sergeant rocket engine exploded, the boom rumbled through the computer room, startling the women. Late that afternoon the engineers brought in the remnants of the full-scale motor, now only twisted tendrils of steel, for the women to see. There was no trace of a star left. Something had gone wrong in their calculations. And it kept going wrong. For twelve successive firings in 1950, the star split open and the rocket motor prematurely exploded, not coming close to its target. Despite the danger, the team stubbornly continued the tests, even though each explosion was tempting fate, opening the door to potential accidents.
The engineers and computers were closing in on a solution, however. Part of the problem lay with the star itself: its points were too sharp, causing the entire structure to crack under pressure. The women’s calculations showed that by rounding the points of the star and using a thicker casing, they could make the rocket fly farther before it exploded. However, the overwhelming number of failures had made Louis Dunn, director of the lab, worry over safety. He shut down the project, much to everyone’s disappointment.
The fate of the burning star was still uncertain when Marie Crowley started at JPL in 1951. She came to the lab after working briefly in the data reduction group at Aerojet. The company manufactured rockets and missiles and had also been founded by the Suicide Squad—Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Ed Forman, along with Martin Summerfield, and their adviser, Theodore von Kármán—in 1942. Aerojet’s connection with JPL meant it was straightforward for Marie to obtain an interview at the lab, which she hoped would be for a more interesting job. She liked the engineers she worked with but found data reduction dull. She was plugging numbers into equations blindly, with no view into the bigger picture of what the calculations meant. The days became an endless stretch of square roots, logarithms, and polynomials. She wanted something more.
Lost in the drudgery of everyday calculations was the beauty that first drew her to math. There was splendor in how numbers could describe nature so perfectly. The Fibonacci numbers, first introduced to Europe in 1202 by an Italian mathematician to describe the expanding nature of rabbit breeding, appear in every part of our world. The sequence of numbers—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…—forms a pattern in which, after the first one, each successive number is the sum of the previous two. The power of this sequence is such that it is echoed in the number of petals in flowers: sunflowers have precisely 55, 89, or 144 petals. It defines the spiraling way leaves wind around a plant, the prickly scales of pinecones and pineapples, and the shape of seashells. The numbers are reflected in a starfish’s five arms, the number of bones in our fingers, and even the way living cells divide.
Marie developed an appreciation for the Fibonacci sequence at Immaculate Heart College, in Los Angeles, where she had recently finished her double major in chemistry and mathematics. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her father, hiding his pride, warned her, “You’d better make money.” Like Depression-era babies everywhere, Marie above all wanted to find a good, steady job. But she was crushed when she learned there were no positions in chemistry available at JPL. The department already had three women, which the manager, a man, had determined was the ideal number. Unlike Macie, he saw the fairer sex as unstable employees, liable to leave as soon as they were enticed by marriage or children. Perhaps he was letting his personal life color his view of women in the workforce—both his mother and wife had stayed home to raise children—despite the fact that the women in his department had been there for years and had no plans to leave.
Although Marie couldn’t work in chemistry, there was an available computer position, and she decided to apply. She was nervous as Macie interviewed her. Macie was a small woman, and to Marie she looked like a mother-in-law, not a boss. One of the first questions surprised her: “Do you mind working with colored people?” No one had ever asked Marie that before. She answered, “No.”
After she started work, she understood why Macie had asked her that unusual question. She would be sharing a large wooden desk with Janez Lawson. By this time, the computers had moved from their cramped, drafty quarters in Building 11 to the bright, new two-story Building 122. Wedged next to the engineers, the women were in an ideal spot for conversation between the groups. The computer room had large windows to let in the sunshine. Sometimes it was a little too sunny—there was no air-conditioning, and in the heat of the day, drops of sweat lined the computers’ brows and moistened their palms as they scribbled away in their notebooks. By now, there was an abundance of Friden calculators, one for every desk, but only one of them was capable of square roots, so they still had to take turns on it.
In their shared space, Janez and Marie became close friends, working on projects together and spending time at each other’s homes when the workday ended. Janez confided to Marie that she loved working with scientists. “Scientists are less prejudiced,” she said. “They’re caught up in all these things that the average person isn’t even interested in.” Marie laughed; she couldn’t agree more.
Marie was impressed with Janez’s proficiency in mathematics. It was obvious to her that Macie thought the world of her as well. Janez was one of only two computers whom JPL sent to the IBM training school. The training would come in handy with the arrival of its first computer not made of flesh and blood. The IBM 701 was the company’s first commercial scientific computer, and they called it the defense calculator. While the term “computer” had been used to describe a person who computes since the 1600s, it had been used for machines as early as the late 1800s. Although still more often used for people, the word became increasingly common in describing electronic machines in the 1940s.
The IBM 701 was a delicate dance of tubes and memory. It was filled with tens of thousands of germanium diode tubes, each one roughly the size of a thumb, which acted similarly to lightbulbs, able to amplify electrical signals. The tubes routed the data, called binary digits, or “bits,” from input to output. The computer also featured an advanced electronic memory system, using black magnetic tape as wide as a sheet of letter paper wound around reels. The technology of using magnetic tape to store audio recordings had been around since World War II. While appalled at the heinous consequences of the Nazi regime, American GIs couldn’t help but admire the quality of their audio recordings. You could listen to a song in your bunk in the wee hours of the morning, and it sounded as if the orchestra were playing live to an audience, without the hissing pops and needle scratches that were part of the playback of 78 rpm records. Little did anyone expect how the technology would be modified.
IBM was one of the first to adapt it for computer memory instead of audio recordings. Just like its audio cousin, the Magnetophon, the IBM 701 used tape whose surface was coated with rust particles. The machine would write information onto the tape using magnets. The magnets created a current that in turn magnetized the rust particles. Each magnetized particle was a stored piece of data. Each reel of tape could hold two million digits, and the computer had four reels.
It took a room with the same square footage as most of the computers’ houses to contain the IBM 701. It wasn’t just one big box but eleven separate components that, together, weighed a whopping 20,516 pounds. Notwithstanding its size, the 701 moved IBM into the computer business. At first the company didn’t think it would have many customers for the machine. At a stockholder meeting, IBM’s president, Thomas Watson Jr., explained that they were expecting to sell only five of them, but “we came home with orders for eighteen.” One of those orders was for JPL.
Despite a monthly rental price starting at $11,900, the 701 came with no instruction manual. To use the machine one had to learn an obscure numerical code. Even the simplest of operations, such as obtaining a square root, involved an incredible amount of programming. Even worse, the giant was prone to overheating. Although IBM boasted that the computer could perform sixteen t
housand addition or subtraction operations a second, the system was constantly failing. A single burnt-out tube torpedoed the entire thing, making the computers and engineers suspect its accuracy and reliability. With her special training at IBM, Janez was one of the first to do any computer programming at JPL.
Marie was a newlywed, married to her college sweetheart. Their life together was delayed when Paul was drafted to serve in the Korean War. Between his basic training and deployment, they saw little of each other. It was heartbreaking to be young and in love with a man who was never home. Marie felt lonely in the empty house; it seemed she was waiting for her life to begin. She escaped her feelings of isolation at work. While her husband fought the Cold War as a soldier in Korea, she was doing her part designing weapons at home.
Although she didn’t carry a gun like her husband, her life was still sometimes at risk. When Marie was at Aerojet she heard a boom break the silence of a quiet Thursday afternoon, and the ground trembled underneath her feet. It was the loudest sound she had ever heard. She had become somewhat used to the explosions triggered by the large motor tests, but this was something different. As she looked around at the other computers and engineers she shared a workroom with, they heard shouting through the open windows.
Minutes later one of the engineers came into the room, his face covered in sweat. “There’s been an accident,” he explained. “It’s the solid propellant.” He looked around gravely at the roomful of employees. The engineer explained that they had been mixing the new solid propellant when it exploded. No one quite knew why. “Was anyone hurt?” Marie asked, but before he could get the words out, she saw the answer on his face. He nodded. The room fell silent again, and they could hear the faraway sound of an emergency vehicle on its way.
Eleven men were dead or dying in the test pits merely two hundred yards away from where Marie sat. She had become inured to the frequent explosions and even the minor injuries surrounding them. Death, however, shook her out of her complacency. These were her friends. Marie and the engineers she worked with considered the equations they’d calculated, agonizing over whether their math had killed their co-workers. The Cold War, and with it their army contracts, were creating pressure, driving them to hurry. The urgency weighed on them daily. Not long after their pencils left the page, their notebooks were run down to the test pits. Their work was rarely even double-checked. No safety precautions were in place, and there were no inspections.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 8