Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race(16)

At the front of the room, like teachers in a classroom, sat two former East Area Computers: Margery Hannah, West Computing’s section head, and her assistant, Blanche Sponsler. Tall and lanky, with enormous eyes and even bigger glasses, Margery Hannah started working at the lab in 1939 after graduating from Idaho State University, not long after the East Area Computing pool outgrew the office it shared with Pearl Young. Young, hired in 1922, and for the better part of two decades the laboratory’s only female engineer, now served as the laboratory’s technical editor (the “English critic,” as she was usually called) and managed a small, mostly female staff responsible for setting the standards for the NACA’s research reports. Virginia Tucker, who had ascended to the position of head computer, ran Langley’s entire computing operation of over two hundred women, and supervised Margery Hannah and the other section heads. The work that came to a particular section usually flowed down from the top of the pyramid: engineers came to Virginia Tucker with computing assignments; she parceled out the tasks to her section heads, who then divided up the work among the girls in their sections. Over time, engineers might bring their computing directly to the section head, or even to a particular girl whose work they liked.

With labor shortages affecting the laboratory’s ability to execute time-sensitive drag cleanup and other tests designed to make military aircraft as powerful, safe, and efficient as possible, the West Computers added much-needed minds to the agency’s escalating research effort. The NACA planned to double the size of Langley’s West Area in the next three years. Mother Langley had even given birth to two new laboratories: the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, in 1939, and the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940. Both laboratories siphoned off Langley employees, including computers, for their startup staffs. The agency scrambled to keep up with the production miracle that was the American aircraft industry, which had gone from the country’s forty-third largest industry in 1938 to the world’s number one by 1943.

For most of its existence a small and contained operation, the NACA’s flagship laboratory was now a many-layered bureaucracy flush with new faces. As engineering groups grew in number and complexity, an employee’s daily routine was pegged less to the revolutions of the laboratory as a whole and more to the ebb and flow of their individual work groups. Employees sat elbow to elbow with the same people during their morning coffee, ate lunch in their designated time slot in the cafeteria as a group, and left together to catch the evening shuttle bus. Air Scoop published everything from recaps of presentations by aeronautical notables to the scores from the intramural softball league and the dance schedule for the Noble Order of the Green Cow, the club for the laboratory’s fashionable white social set. The weekly dispatch kept employees abreast of the constant activity and fostered morale, but in a breathless year in which the laboratory staff would come close to doubling, it wasn’t easy for the employees themselves to absorb the full impact of the organization’s unusual mission or the unusual assemblage of people carrying it out.

But just one month before Dorothy’s trip from Farmville, Air Scoop covered Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox’s one-day junket to the laboratory. Fifteen hundred employees filed into the Structures Research Laboratory, a cavernous facility located across a dusty clearing from the Warehouse Building, to hear Knox’s address. He congratulated the NACA for leading all federal agencies in employee purchases of war bonds—larger versions of the war stamps on sale at the Moton school—and lauded them for the research that turned an unreliable prototype of a dive bomber into the “slow but deadly” SBD Dauntless, a decisive force in the navy’s June 1942 victory at the Battle of Midway.

“You men and women working here far from the sound of drums and guns, working in your civilian capacity in accordance with your highly specialized skills, are winning your part of this war: the battle of research,” said Knox. “This war is being fought in the laboratories as well as on the battlefields.”

The employees spread out from one side of the room to the other, from foreground to background, a mass occupying the enormous space like gas filling a hot air balloon. Knox, a dot at the far end of the room, stood at a podium in front of a giant American flag. White men dominated the crowd from front to back, the majority in some permutation of shirtsleeves and ties or jackets and sweaters, a good number in the coveralls of mechanics and laborers. A cluster of grandees in tweeds and armbands identifying them as minders to the secretary and his entourage stood off to the side in the front. Whiz kids of the day—John D. Bird, Francis Rogallo, John Becker, their names already circulated as being among the top in the discipline—smiled from a few rows back. Clustered in the left corner of the room stood twenty or so black men, all wearing work coats and dungarees, a few sharpening their outfits with newsboy caps or brimmed hats. White women were sprinkled throughout the crowd, many in the front row, their knee-length skirts sensibly accessorized with the practical footwear that could stand up to treks across the Langley campus. Flanking John Becker were more female faces—brown faces, peering out from the middle distance. Thelma Stiles smiled, Pearl Bassette’s glasses caught the light of the flash. Tiny Miriam Mann’s head was barely visible over the shoulders of the crowd. Who would have thought that such a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar workers, those who worked with their hands and those who worked with numbers, was actually possible? And who would guess that the southern city of Hampton, Virginia, was the place to find it?