Angle of Attack
By the 1950s, Dorothy Vaughan was also looking forward to a time of change, imagining an era when she and the other computers who wore skirts would be forced to concede ground to the inanimate computers that were redefining the technological frontier. As much as any other profession, aeronautical engineering embodied the restlessness and technological progress that characterized what was already being dubbed the American Century. Jet engines were replacing propellers. The fulfillment of Mach 1 fed the appetite for Mach 2. Supersonic begat hypersonic. Curiosity would not be sated until the mechanical finches that were now so abundant around the globe had evolved to fly to the limits of the atmosphere.
With the complexity that attended the relentless advance of aeronautical research came the need for a new machine. In 1947, the laboratory bought an “electronic calculator” from Bell Telephone Laboratories, an investment in the ongoing need for transonic flight research. Modeling flight at transonic speeds was a particularly knotty problem, because of the subsonic and supersonic winds that passed over the plane or model simultaneously. Aerodynamic equations describing transonic airflows might contain as many as thirty-five variables. Because each point in the airflow was dependent on the others, an error made in one part of the series would cause an error in all the others. Calculating the pressure distribution over a particular airfoil at a transonic speed could easily take a month to complete for the most experienced of mathematicians. The Bell calculator accomplished the same task in a few hours.
No one would confuse the women who used mechanical calculators to process research data with the room-sized electronic devices that performed the same function. Langley put a former East Computer named Sara Bullock in charge of a group dedicated to using the squat, gunmetal-gray block to solve engineers’ equations. Already considered superior to the University of Pennsylvania’s pioneering ENIAC computer, the Bell used paper punch tapes as input and chugged along at two seconds per operation. The whole building shook when it ran, but it generated answers sixteen times faster than the human computers, with the additional benefit that after the women went home for the day, the Bell could be left running overnight.
In the mid-1950s the center bought its first IBM computers—an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, then an IBM 650. Originally destined for the lab’s finance department, enterprising researchers soon appropriated the machines for their own purposes. One of the uses was to calculate a trajectory—a detailed flight path—for a hypersonic “rocket plane” called the X-15, an experimental vehicle engineered to fly high and fast enough to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the threshold of what was considered “space.”
The early data-processing machines weren’t paragons of reliability. They made mistakes, and engineers—or, more likely, the human (female) computers who worked for them—had to keep a close watch on machines’ output. “That’s not right!” “Let’s run it again!” engineers would say to the machine’s operators, just like John Becker had said to Mary Jackson. But even with the errors, the machines processed the transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows and trajectory analyses in a way that surpassed the upper limits of human ability. In the 1950s, most of Langley’s test data was still processed by hand; the NACA’s entire research operation had evolved with the women’s work as its engine. Electronic computers were rare jewels, their million-dollar-plus price tags affordable only by large research universities and government institutions. And for all their advantage in speed, the computers could still process only one job at a time. The devices chug-chug-chugged around the clock, but competition for computing time on the machines was fierce.
Only the most shortsighted, however, failed to recognize that electronic computers were around for the long haul. Electronic data processing machines brought otherwise unattainable power and efficiency to the research process. There was no reason to think that they wouldn’t continue to poach more tasks that were currently completed by hand. Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new. Propeller research, for example, had been one of Langley’s most important lines of inquiry from its inception through the lead-up to the war. By 1951, the Propeller Research Tunnel was declared obsolete and demolished, and the engineers that had staffed it were left to find a new specialty or retire.
The female mathematicians’ job security wasn’t immediately threatened by the machines, but Dorothy Vaughan perceived that mastering the machine would be the key to long-term career stability. When Langley sponsored a series of computation courses to be held after work and on weekends, Dorothy wasted no time enrolling. She encouraged the women in her group to do the same.
“Integration is going to come,” she told her employees. The blurring of the color lines could put her and her reports in a position to qualify for the desirable jobs that were sure to open for people who were experts in managing the electronic computers. To keep moving forward, they needed to take advantage of every opportunity to make themselves as valuable as possible to the laboratory.
Scientific progress in the twentieth century had been relatively linear; social progress, on the other hand, did not always move in a straight line, as the descent from the hopeful years after the Civil War into the despairing circumstances of the Jim Crow laws proved. But since World War II, one brick after another had been pried from the walls of segregation. The Supreme Court victories opening graduate education to black students, the executive orders integrating the federal government and the military, the victory, both real and symbolic, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Negro baseball player Jackie Robinson, were all new landings reached, new corners turned, hopes that pushed Negroes to redouble their efforts to sever the link between separate and equal decisively and permanently.