Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race(4)

Thus installed, the newly minted civil servants fanned out to take their places in one of the research facility’s expanding inventory of buildings, each already as full as a pod ripe with peas. No sooner had Sherwood Butler, the laboratory’s head of procurement, set the final brick on a new building than his brother, Melvin, set about filling it with new employees. Closets and hallways, stockrooms and workshops stood in as makeshift offices. Someone came up with the bright idea of putting two desks head to head and jury-rigged the new piece of furniture with a jump seat in order to squeeze three workers into space designed for two. In the four years since Hitler’s troops overran Poland—since American interests and the European war converged in an all-consuming conflict—the laboratory’s complement of 500-odd employees at the close of the decade was on its way to 1,500. Yet the great groaning war machine swallowed them whole and remained hungry for more.

The offices of the Administration Building looked out upon the crescent-shaped airfield. Only the flow of civilian-clothed people heading to the laboratory, the oldest outpost of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), distinguished the low brick buildings belonging to that agency from identical ones used by the US Army Air Corps. The two installations had grown up together, the air base devoted to the development of America’s military airpower capability, the laboratory a civilian agency charged with advancing the scientific understanding of aeronautics and disseminating its findings to the military and private industry. Since the beginning, the army had allowed the laboratory to operate on the campus of the airfield. The close relationship with the army flyers served as a constant reminder to the engineers that every experiment they conducted had real-world implications.

The double hangar—two 110-foot-long buildings standing side by side—had been covered in camouflage paint in 1942 to deceive enemy eyes in search of targets, its shady and cavernous interior sheltering the machines and their minders from the elements. Men in canvas jumpsuits, often in groups, moved in trucks and jeeps from plane to plane, stopping to hover at this one or that like pollinating insects, checking them, filling them with gas, replacing parts, examining them, becoming one with them and taking off for the heavens. The music of airplane engines and propellers cycling through the various movements of takeoff, flight, and landing played from before sunrise until dusk, each machine’s sounds as unique to its minders as a baby’s cry to its mother. Beneath the tenor notes of the engines played the bass roar of the laboratory’s wind tunnels, turning their on-demand hurricanes onto the planes—plane parts, model planes, full-sized planes.

Just two years prior, with the storm clouds gathering, President Roosevelt challenged the nation to ramp up its production of airplanes to fifty thousand per year. It seemed an impossible task for an industry that as recently as 1938 had only provided the Army Air Corps with ninety planes a month. Now, America’s aircraft industry was a production miracle, easily surpassing Roosevelt’s mark by more than half. It had become the largest industry in the world, the most productive, the most sophisticated, outproducing the Germans by more than three times and the Japanese by nearly five. The facts were clear to all belligerents: the final conquest would come from the sky.

For the flyboys of the air corps, airplanes were mechanisms for transporting troops and supplies to combat zones, armed wings for pursuing enemies, sky-high launching pads for ship-sinking bombs. They reviewed their vehicles in an exhaustive preflight checkout before climbing into the sky. Mechanics rolled up their sleeves and sharpened their eyes; a broken piston, an improperly locked shoulder harness, a faulty fuel tank light, any one of these could cost lives. But even before the plane responded to its pilot’s knowing caress, its nature, its very DNA—from the shape of its wings to the cowling of its engine—had been manipulated, refined, massaged, deconstructed, and recombined by the engineers next door.

Long before America’s aircraft manufacturers placed one of their newly conceived flying machines into production, they sent a working prototype to the Langley laboratory so that the design could be tested and improved. Nearly every high-performance aircraft model the United States produced made its way to the lab for drag cleanup: the engineers parked the planes in the wind tunnels, making note of air-disturbing surfaces, bloated fuselages, uneven wing geometries. As prudent and thorough as old family doctors, they examined every aspect of the air flowing over the plane, making careful note of the vital signs. NACA test pilots, sometimes with an engineer riding shotgun, took the plane for a flight. Did it roll unexpectedly? Did it stall? Was it hard to maneuver, resisting the pilot like a shopping cart with a bad wheel? The engineers subjected the airplanes to tests, capturing and analyzing the numbers, recommending improvements, some slight, others significant. Even small improvements in speed and efficiency multiplied over millions of pilot miles added up to a difference that could tip the long-term balance of the war in the Allies’ favor.

“Victory through airpower!” Henry Reid, engineer-in-charge of the Langley laboratory, crooned to his employees, the shibboleth a reminder of the importance of the airplane to the war’s outcome. “Victory through airpower!” the NACA-ites repeated to each other, minding each decimal point, poring over differential equations and pressure distribution charts until their eyes tired. In the battle of research, victory would be theirs.

Unless, of course, Melvin Butler failed to feed the three-shift-a-day, six-day-a-week operation with fresh minds. The engineers were one thing, but each engineer required the support of a number of others: craftsmen to build the airplane models tested in the tunnels, mechanics to maintain the tunnels, and nimble number crunchers to process the numerical deluge that issued from the research. Lift and drag, friction and flow. What was a plane but a bundle of physics? Physics, of course, meant math, and math meant mathematicians. And since the middle of the last decade, mathematicians had meant women. Langley’s first female computing pool, started in 1935, had caused an uproar among the men of the laboratory. How could a female mind process something so rigorous and precise as math? The very idea, investing $500 on a calculating machine so it could be used by a girl! But the “girls” had been good, very good—better at computing, in fact, than many of the engineers, the men themselves grudgingly admitted. With only a handful of girls winning the title “mathematician”—a professional designation that put them on equal footing with entry-level male employees—the fact that most computers were designated as lower-paid “subprofessionals” provided a boost to the laboratory’s bottom line.