Hi, my name is Laura Freeman, I'm an illustrator.
I illustrated this book and I'm going to read it to you.
It's called Hidden Figures, The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race.
It was written by Margot Lee Shetterly with Winifred Conkling.
Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and
Christine Darden were good at math, really good.
In 1943, the United States was at war, World War II.
Dorothy Vaughn wanted to serve her country by working for
the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,
the government agency that designed airplanes.
Having the best airplanes would help America win the war.
Making airplanes fly faster, and higher, and safer meant doing lots of tests at
the agency's Langley laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.
Tests meant numbers, numbers meant math, and math meant computers.
Today, we think of computers as machines.
But in the 1940s, computers were actual people like Dorothy, Mary,
Katherine, and Christine, their job was to do math.
Because Dorothy was black and a woman,
some people thought it would be impossible for her to get a job as a computer.
She lived in Virginia, a southern state,
where a laws segregated or kept apart people, black people and white people.
They cannot eat at the same restaurants.
They cannot drink from the same water fountains.
They could not use the same restrooms.
They cannot attend the same schools.
They could not play on the same sports teams.
They could not sit near each other in movie theaters.
They could marry someone of a different race.
But Dorothy didn't think it was impossible, she was good at math,
really good.
She knew she was the right person for the job.
She applied and the laboratory offered her a position as a computer.
At work, blacks and whites were kept apart.
The white computers worked in one building, and Dorothy and the other black
computers worked in a different building in their separate office.
Even though they worked on the same kinds of assignments, the black computers and
white computers used separate bathrooms and ate lunch in separate lunch rooms.
America won the war in 1945, but Dorothy stayed on the job,
still trying to make airplanes faster and safer.
By 1951, the Americans and
the Russians were competing to see who could build the best planes.
That meant more experiments and more numbers, lots and lot of numbers.
And more numbers meant the need for more computers.
That's when Mary Jackson got a job as a computer at Langley.
She worked in a group that tested model airplanes in a wind tunnel.
A wind tunnel was a machine like a huge metal box with a powerful fan attached.
Mary put model airplanes in the wind tunnel and
blasted them with air from the fan.
This experiment helped her group improve their designs on the models before
building full-sized airplanes.
Mary wanted to become an engineer, but officials said it was impossible.
Most of the engineers at the laboratory were men, and
to become an engineer Mary needed to take high level math classes.
But she wasn't allowed to go inside the white school where the classes
were taught.
But Mary was good at math, really good, and she refused to give up.
She got permission to enter the school building and take the math classes, and
she earned good grades.
But she didn't give up.
Because she didn't give up, Mary Jackson
became the first African American female engineer at the laboratory.
Katherine Johnson was good at math and always asked lots of questions.
In 1953, she applied to the laboratory for a computer job and
was placed on a team that tested actual planes while they were flying in the air.
Their research was used to figure out ways to prevent future plane crashes.
In one of her first projects, she learned how to analyze turbulence or
dangerous gusts of air.
No one knows how many lives her work may have helped save.
Katherine wanted to help the group prepare its research reports, so
she asked if she could go to meetings with the other experts on her team.
Her boss told her it was impossible.
Women aren't allowed to attend meetings, he said.
But Katherine knew she was as good at math as anyone else,
maybe better, so she asked him again, and again, and again.
Katherine asked her boss so
many times that he finally invited her to the meetings.
Katherine was good at math, really good.
And because she fought to be treated the same as the men, she became the first
woman in her group to sign her name to one of the group's reports.
In the 1950s, the Langley laboratory bought a machine computer that could
do math faster than the human computers.
At first, these machines make mistakes.
Dorothy learned how to program the machines so
that they got the right answers.
She taught the women in her group how to program the computers too.
In 1957, Russia launched a satellite known as Sputnik into orbit around the Earth.
The United States started building satellites to explore space too.
For years, the laboratory had used math to design airplanes.
Now it would need math to create spaceships as well.
The government decided to change the agency's name from
the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA.
In 1961, President John F Kennedy told Congress,
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before
this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.
A man on the moon?
But the first step to getting a man on the moon was to send
an astronaut around the Earth.
NASA was going to need to hire more space experts and
more people who were good at math, really good.
The people at the laboratory had to work together from morning to night to figure
out how to send astronaut John Glenn into space and
bring him back home toward safely.
Katherine Johnson knew she could use math to help.
Tell me where you want his spaceship to land and I'll tell you where to launch it,
Katherine told her boss.
Katherine helped calculate the trajectories or
the pathways that rockets travel through space.
She had to plan Glenn's exact route from takeoff in Florida to splashdown
in the Atlantic Ocean.
There was no room for error.
No one was better than Katherine at solving these tricky math problems.
Days before his mission, John Glenn wanted Katherine to double check the machine
computer's trajectory calculations to make sure it hadn't made any mistakes.
When Katherine said the numbers were correct, Glenn was ready to go.
On February 20th, 1962, Glenn blasted off into space,
circled the Earth, and made his way home safely.
Meanwhile, laws began to change so that black and
white students could go to school together.
Blacks fought for the right to sit besides whites on buses and
to drink from the same water fountains.
At the laboratory, black and white computers started working together in
the same offices, eating at the same lunch tables, and using the same bathrooms.
Black and white moviegoers could sit next to each other in the same theater.
Across the country,
people started to think about ways to bring equality to all Americans.
Katherine Darden was good at math and she loved electronic computers.
She started working at Langley in 1967.
Christine wanted to become an engineer, and thanks to Dorothy, Mary, and
Katherine she knew it was possible.
Eventually, she became an engineer for supersonic airplanes,
planes flying faster than the speed of sound.
But her first job was to help with NASA's mission to the moon.
The people at the laboratory prepared for years to send astronauts to the moon,
about 238,900 miles away from the Earth.
Finally, on July 20th, 1969, the world watched as
the three men arrived at the moon in their Apollo 11 spacecraft.
That's one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind,
said astronaut Neil Armstrong when he stepped into the dusty surface.
But it was also a giant leap for Dorothy, Mary, Katherine, and Christine, and all of
the other computers and engineers who had worked at the laboratory over the years.
The moon landing was a success from takeoff to splashdown, but
there was no time to rest.
Once NASA landed astronauts on the moon, the people at the laboratory began
dreaming of sending humans to other planets such as Mars, or Jupiter, or
Saturn.
They started to imagine hyperfast spaceplanes that could travel around
the Earth at seven times the speed of sound.
The next adventure wouldn't be easy and would require lots of tests and
lots of numbers.
But Dorothy, Mary, Katherine, and Christine knew one thing.
With hard work, perseverance, and a love of math anything was possible.
The end of the book has a timeline from the very beginning when
the Wright brothers invented the first airplane,
all the way through when the women started working there.
At the end, there's also a little bit more about each woman's story.
[MUSIC] And then there's a glossary of some of
the words, the terms that I used in the book.
[MUSIC]
I hope you enjoyed
my book, and
I'll see you
next time.
[MUSIC]