“Either give her a raise or send her back to me,” Dorothy said to Henry Pearson, sitting upstairs in his office in 1244. A Langley engineer in the old style, Pearson had graduated from Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and started work at the lab in 1930. He was a keen golfer, a horn-rimmed glasses wearer, the epitome of the New England WASP. Pearson was not a big fan of women in the workplace. His wife did not work; rumor had it that Mrs. Henry Pearson had been forbidden by her husband from holding a job.
As a branch chief attached to the high-profile Flight Research Division, Henry Pearson stood a level above Dorothy in the Langley management hierarchy. By the time Dorothy came to the laboratory in 1943, Pearson had already served as an assistant division chief for many years. Fearless as she was, Dorothy would have approached Henry Pearson even if she weren’t a manager, but the official title of section head lent her additional authority. It put her on equal footing with the other female supervisors and—theoretically, at least—with men of the same rating, and it afforded her a degree of center-wide visibility. When calculating machine manufacturer Monroe asked Langley for its help producing a handbook on how to work algebraic equations with its machines, Dorothy was drafted as a consultant, working on a team with other well-respected women at Langley, including Vera Huckel from the Vibration and Flutter branch and Helen Willey of the Gas Dynamics complex.
The meeting between Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson ended as they both knew it would, with Pearson offering Katherine Goble a permanent position in his group, the Maneuver Loads Branch, with a corresponding increase in salary. Dorothy’s insistence also had a collateral effect: one of the white computers in the branch, in the same limbo position as Katherine, had herself gone to Pearson to petition for a raise. The white woman’s request had fallen on deaf ears. The rules are the rules, Dorothy reminded Henry Pearson. Dorothy wielded her influence to win promotions for both Katherine and her white colleague.
The fact was, the engineers who worked for Henry Pearson realized soon after Katherine Goble took a seat at her desk in 1244 that their new computer was a keeper, and they had no intention of sending her back. Katherine’s familiarity with higher-level math made her a versatile addition to the branch. Her library of graduate-school textbooks crowded onto her desk next to the calculating machine, ready references if she needed them.
The Flight Research Division was a den of high-energy, free-thinking, aggressive, and very smart engineers. They and their brethren in the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD), a group specializing in the aerodynamics of rockets and missiles, spent their time not in the confines of the wind tunnels but in the company of live, fire-breathing, ear-splitting, temperamental metal projectiles. The “black-haired, leather-faced, crew-haircutted human cyclone” head of the Flight Research Division, Langley’s chief test pilot, Melvin Gough, early in his engineering career had decided to take his life in his hands to train as a test pilot in order to improve the quality of his research reports. Testosterone filtered up from the hangar along with the jet-fuel fumes. It wasn’t the kind of place that would exhibit particular patience for anyone, male or female, who took too long to scale the learning curve. Timidity in the Flight Research Division would get a girl nowhere.
Fortunately, Katherine Goble’s confidence in her own mathematical abilities, and her innate curiosity, pushed her to pepper the engineers with questions, just as she had as a child with her parents and teachers. They fielded her inquiries with gusto: they could, and did, spend most of their lives talking and thinking about flight and would never run out of patience for the topic.
The Maneuver Loads Branch conducted research on the forces on an airplane as it moved out of stable, steady flight or tried to return to stable, steady flight. A sister branch, Stability and Control, developed the systems that would provide a plane with a smooth ride through rough air. The vehicles at the extreme experimental end of the aeronautical spectrum were the ones that made the romantic aeronautical engineer’s heart beat faster—supersonic planes, hypersonic planes, planes capable of brushing the limits of space—but the transportation revolution fostered in no small part by Langley engineers like Henry Pearson had created a demand for research on vehicles designed for much more pedestrian pursuits. One of the tasks of the Maneuver Loads Branch was to examine safety concerns provoked by increasingly crowded skies.
One of the first assignments to land on Katherine’s desk involved getting to the bottom of an accident involving a small Piper propeller plane. The plane, which was flying along in otherwise unremarkable fashion, literally fell out of the clear blue sky and crashed to the ground. The NACA received the plane’s flight recorder, and the engineers assigned Katherine to analyze the photographic film record of the flight’s vital signs, the first step in the search for answers as to what might have befallen the plane. For hours upon hours, day after day, she sat in a dark room and peered through a film reader, noting and writing down the airspeed, acceleration, altitude, and other metrics of the flight that were measured in regular time intervals over the course of the flight. The engineers specified any conversions to be applied to the raw data—converting, for example, miles per hour to feet per second—and supplied Katherine with the equations to be used to analyze the converted data. As a final step, Katherine plotted the data in order to give engineers a visual snapshot of the plane’s disrupted flight.
Then the engineers set up an experiment re-creating the circumstances of the accident, flying a test plane into the trailing wake of a larger plane. The data from that, too, washed onto Katherine Goble’s desk: seemingly endless hours, days, weeks, months of the same thing. It was typical eye-straining, monotonous computing work—and Katherine loved every moment of it.
When the engineers analyzed Katherine’s reduced data, they were fascinated, realizing they were uncovering something they had not quite seen before. It turned out that the Piper had flown perpendicularly across the flight path of a jet plane that had just passed through the area. A disturbance caused by a plane could trouble the air for as long as half an hour after it flew through. The wake vortex of the larger plane had acted like an invisible trip wire: upon crossing the rough river of air left behind by the jet, the propeller plane stumbled in midair and tumbled out of the sky. That research, and other investigations like it, led to changes in air traffic regulations, mandating minimum distances between flight paths so as to prevent that kind of wake turbulence accident.
When Katherine Goble read the report, she found it “one of the most interesting things she had ever read,” and felt tremendous satisfaction to have participated in something that would have positive, real-world results. Her enthusiasm for the work, even the parts that others considered drudgery, was irrepressible. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, getting paid to do math, the thing that came most naturally to her in the world.