While the national press published stories on Langley’s link to the Rosenberg scandal, industry outlets like Aviation Week lauded the laboratory for two related advances that would revolutionize high-speed aircraft production: slotted walls in wind tunnels and an innovation known as the Area Rule.
The point of a wind tunnel, of course, was to simulate as closely as possible the conditions that prevailed in free flight. Interference from airflows bouncing off the solid walls of the test section, one of the phenomena examined by Margery Hannah and Sam Katzoff in their 1948 report, was one of the limitations of ground-based testing. The problem was most notable in the transonic range, as the eddies of air surrounding an object approached the speed of sound. A Langley researcher named Ray Wright had the intuition that cutting holes or slots in the walls of the wind tunnels would alleviate the interference effects, a concept that was proven when Langley built a small test tunnel with perforated walls. In 1950, they retrofitted the Sixteen-foot High-Speed Tunnel (rechristened the Sixteen-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel) with slotted walls and then did the same for the Eight-foot High-Speed Tunnel. Taming the tunnel interference was a “long sought technical prize” for the researchers, and in 1951 it earned John Stack and his colleagues another coveted Collier Trophy.
The new tunnel design set the stage for the second of the decade’s significant developments. An engineer named Richard Whitcomb noticed that in the transonic speed range, the greatest turbulence occurred at the point where the wings of a model plane connected to its fuselage. Indenting the plane’s body inward along that joint reduced the drag dramatically and resulted in an increase of as much as 25 percent in the plane’s speed for the same level of power. The Area Rule (so-called because the formula predicted the correct ratio of the area of a cross-section of a plane’s wing to the area of the cross-section of its body) had the potential to have a greater impact on everyday aviation than supersonic aircraft, because of the thousands of aircraft whose operating speed topped out at the transonic range. The press had more than the usual fun with such an esoteric engineering concept, calling the new planes “wasp-waisted” and “Coke-bottle shaped” and talking about the “Marilyn Monroe effect.” Whitcomb scored a sit-down with CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite and gained a measure of local celebrity (“Hampton Engineer Besieged by Public,” read a somewhat hyperbolic Daily Press headline). In 1954, Whitcomb would take home Langley’s third Collier Trophy in less than a decade.
For all the advances that had occurred on the laboratory’s watch since 1917—cowled engines, laminar flow airfoils, supersonic research planes, an icing tunnel that led to improvements in flight safety in freezing temperatures—the existing body of aeronautical knowledge still sheltered unexplored corners. The investments in new and upgraded facilities on Langley’s West Side made in the late 1940s and early 1950s were yielding research breakthroughs and impacting the nature of the assignments Dorothy handed out to her staff.
Unlike academically oriented research organizations, the NACA’s laboratories always strove to live up to the “practical solutions” of their founding mission. The hands-on nature of the work at Langley was visible in the planes parked in the hangar, in the workshops where craftsmen built models to the engineers’ specifications, in the work of the mechanics who affixed the models in the proper positions in the test sections, and in the guts of the powerful new tunnels like the Unitary Plan Tunnel, which looked like “an oil refinery under a roof.” No matter how abstract the work or how conceptual the problem being solved, no one at Langley ever forgot that behind the numbers was a real-world goal: faster planes, more efficient planes, safer planes.
Of course, the NACA wasn’t such a bad place for the theoretical engineers either. Dorothy Hoover thrived in the Stability Analysis Division. By 1951, she had earned the lofty title of aeronautical research scientist, graded GS-9 in the government’s revamped rating system. When Hoover’s boss, R. T. Jones, left Langley for the NACA’s Ames laboratory in 1946, Dorothy continued her work with the group’s other notable researchers. Her Langley career reached a peak in 1951 with the publication of two reports, one with Frank Malvestuto, the other with Herbert Ribner, both of them detailed analyses of the swept-back wings that were now a standard feature of production aircraft. What the compressed-air and fresh-air engineers examined through direct observation, the theoreticians approached through fifty-page treatises in which one single equation might occupy the better part of a page. If research production was a measure of career viability—and it was—theoretical aerodynamics might have been the best place in the world to be a female researcher. Dorothy Hoover, Doris Cohen, and at least three other women published one or more reports with the group between 1947 and 1951. The leaders of the group clearly valued and cultivated the talent of their female members. Perhaps it was the remove from the brawnier aspects of engineering that made the theoretical group such a productive environment for women.
In 1952, Dorothy Hoover decided to take a leave of absence from the world of engineering and give herself over to the theoretical pursuits that were closest to her heart. She resigned from Langley and returned to her alma mater, Arkansas AM&N, for a master’s degree in mathematics. Her thesis, “On Estimates of Error in Numerical Integration,” was included in the 1954 proceedings of the Arkansas Academy of Science. That same year she enrolled in the University of Michigan under a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, a program designed to match talented Negro scholars with the country’s most competitive graduate programs.
Mary Jackson, on the other hand, leaned in to the the engineer’s paradise that was the NACA. With a background in math and physics, she brought to the job an understanding of the physical phenomena behind the calculations she worked on. And the Langley people were busy people like her, running off after work to play on one of the laboratory’s sports teams or attend a club meeting or lecture. Many of them tutored kids in math and science, something that Mary had done since graduating from college. Whether or not she had it planned at the time, Mary Jackson was on her way to becoming a Langley lifer.
During new-employee induction on her first day of work, Mary Jackson had met James Williams, a twenty-seven-year-old University of Michigan engineering grad and former Tuskegee airman who had fallen in love with airplanes as a teenager. Williams applied for engineering positions through the Civil Service but had been wary of moving to a state south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Langley’s personnel officer, Melvin Butler, courted Williams energetically by phone, trying to convince him to accept the laboratory’s offer. He even made arrangements for a place for Williams to live in Hampton. Further enticement was provided by a beautiful psychology grad student named Julia, who after graduation would be returning to her native Virginia. Butler, perhaps trying to circumvent complaints that might short-circuit his offer, did not disclose ahead of time to Langley’s engineering staff that the newest recruit was black. Williams wasn’t the first black engineer hired by Langley, but the couple of black men who preceded him had come and gone so quickly that not even their names remained in the institutional memory.