Hidden Figures Read online

Readers of black newspapers around the country followed the exploits of the Tuskegee airmen with an intensity that bordered on the obsessive. Who said a Negro couldn’t fly! Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and the 332nd Fighter Group took the war to the Axis powers from thirty thousand feet. The papers sent special correspondents to shadow the pilots as they served in the skies over Europe, each dispatch from the European front producing shivers of delight. Flyers Help Smash Nazis! Negro Pilots Sink Nazi Warship! 332nd Bags 25 Enemy Planes, Breaks Record in Weekend Victories! No radio serial could compete with the real-life exploits of the men who were the very embodiment of the Double V.

  The “Tan Yanks,” as the black press dubbed the black GIs fighting overseas, loved their planes as passionately as any other American pilots. Their lives, and those of the bomber crews they escorted, depended on knowing the plane’s every strength and weakness, its peccadillos and eccentricities, on coaxing it and coercing it and waltzing with it through the sky. Initially serving in Bell P-39 Airacobras, they moved on to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and by the summer of 1944 the 332nd was flying North American P-51 Mustangs. “The assignment of the terrific P-51 Mustang plane to all of the Negro pilots foreshadows important missions and sweeps ahead for them as the war enters its decisive stage,” wrote the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

  “It’s best described as a ‘pilot’s airplane,’ ” said an American military official in a front-page article in the Washington Post. “It’s very fast and handles beautifully at high speeds. Fliers feel that they have always known how to fly the plane after they’ve been in it only a few moments.” With a big four-blade propeller and a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang sped into the sky like a champion racehorse. Once aloft, it soared for an eternity, pushing up against 400 miles per hour with the ease of a family sedan out for a Sunday drive. And it was a damn fierce contender in a dogfight. As far as the Tuskegee airmen were concerned, it was the best plane in the world.

  “I will get you up in the air, let you do your job, and bring you back to earth safely,” promised the Mustang, and it delivered. Exactly how it did that wasn’t the pilot’s concern, but making good on that pledge was now Dorothy Vaughan’s full-time job.

  “Laboratories at war!” shouted Air Scoop. The NACA sought nothing less than to crush Germany by air, destroying its production machine and interrupting the technological developments that could hand it a military advantage. Langley was one of the United States’ most powerful offensive weapons—a secret weapon, or nearly secret, hidden in plain sight in a small southern town.

  Certainly the Tan Yanks would have marveled to know that supporting the performance of their beloved Mustang was a group of Colored Computers. But whereas every maneuver executed by the 332nd in their red-tailed Mustangs fed the headlines, the daily work of the West Computers and the rest of the laboratory employees was sensitive, confidential, or secret. Henry Reid advised employees to stay on the lookout for spies disguised as Langley Field soldiers and warned of fifth column plants who might coax valuable research from unwitting laboratory employees. Managers upbraided a group of messenger boys overheard dishing office dirt at a local diner, and engineers caught having a loud, detailed work conversation at the Industrial USO were called on the carpet. Air Scoop sounded the alarm: “You tell it to someone who repeats it to someone who’s overheard by someone in Axis pay, so SOMEONE you know . . . may die!” Employees learned to keep mum on the work front even at the family dinner table. But even if they wanted to share the particulars of the day’s toil, finding someone outside of Langley who understood what they were talking about would have been well nigh impossible.

  In the twenty-four years since the Langley laboratory had started operation, the glitterati of the aeronautical world had made pilgrimages to Hampton. Orville Wright and Charles Lindbergh served on the NACA’s executive committee. Amelia Earhart nearly lost her raccoon coat to a wind tunnel’s giant turbine while touring the lab. Tycoon Howard Hughes made an appearance at the lab’s 1934 research conference, and Hollywood showed up at the airfield to shoot the 1938 movie Test Pilot, starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, and Myrna Loy. The people the famous came to see—Eastman Jacobs, Max Munk, Robert Jones, Theodore Theodorsen—were the best minds in a thrilling new discipline. Even so, most locals were oblivious to how they and their colleagues spent their days; and to be frank, they found them more than a little peculiar. Their ways and accents often marked them as Californians, Europeans, Yankees, even, God forbid, “New York Jews.” They donned rumpled shirts with no ties and wore sandals; some of them sported beards. Locals dubbed them “brain busters” or “NACA nuts”; the less polite called them “weirdos.”

  Asked about their jobs, they demurred. Around town, they confused and horrified residents by doing things like dismantling a toaster with a screwdriver at the local department store to make sure the heating coil would toast the bread just so. One employee brought a pressure gauge from the lab into a store to test the suction capabilities of a vacuum cleaner model. Local car salesmen wanted to roll over and play dead when one of the Langley fellas pulled into the lot, fearing a barrage of nonsensical and unanswerable technical questions. They drove to work with books on their steering wheels. The NACA nuts always thought they had a better way to do anything—everything—and didn’t hesitate to tell the locals so. Eastman Jacobs’ legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton’s tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonians’ feelings that the good Lord didn’t always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.

  But Langley was a conclave of the world’s best aerodynamicists, the leading edge of the technology that was transforming not only the nature of war but civilian transportation and the economy. The distance between the NACA’s discovery of new aerodynamic concepts and their application to pressing engineering problems was so short, and the pace of their research and development so constant, that an entry-level position at the laboratory was the best engineering graduate school program in the world. Eager front-row boys from the lecture halls of MIT and Michigan and Purdue and Virginia Tech angled for a shot at getting in the door where Dorothy now sat.

  With the goal of turning lady math teachers into crack junior engineers, the laboratory sponsored a crash course in engineering physics for new computers, an advanced version of the class offered at Hampton Institute. Two days a week after work, Dorothy and the other new girls filed into a makeshift classroom at the laboratory for a full immersion in the fundamental theory of aerodynamics. They also attended a weekly two-hour laboratory session for hands-on training in one of the wind tunnels, shouldering an average of four hours of homework on top of a six-day workweek. Their teachers were the laboratory’s most promising young talents, men such as Arthur Kantrowitz, who was simultaneously an NACA physicist and a Cornell PhD candidate under the supervision of atomic physicist Edward Teller.

  After twelve years at the head of the classroom, the tables had turned, and for the first time since graduating from Wilberforce University, Dorothy Vaughan gave herself fully to the discipline that had most engaged her youthful mind. She had come full circle and then some, as she tried to attune her ear to the argot that flew back and forth between the inhabitants of the laboratory, all seeking to answer the fundamental question “What makes things fly?” Dorothy, like most Americans, had never flown on a plane, and in all likelihood, before landing at Langley, she had never given the question more than a passing consideration.

  The first courses imparted the basics of aerodynamics. For a wing moving through the air, the slower-moving air on the bottom of the wing exerts a greater force than the faster-moving air on the top. This difference in pressure creates lift, the almost magical force that causes the wing, and the plane (or animal) attached to it, to ascend into the sky. Smooth air flowing around the wing means the plane can slip through the sky with minimum friction, the way the most efficient swimmers cut through the water. Turbulent flows, like the swi
rl and churn of rapids in the water, resist the plane, slowing it down and making it harder to maneuver. One of the NACA’s great contributions to aerodynamics was a series of laminar flow airfoils, wing shapes designed to maximize the flow of smooth air around the wing. Aircraft manufacturers could outfit planes with wings based on a variety of NACA specifications, like choosing kitchen appliances from a catalog for a new house. The P-51 Mustang was the first production plane to use one of the NACA’s laminar airfoils, a factor that contributed to its superior performance.

  Future generations would take the advances for granted, but in the early days the mechanical birds yielded their secrets slowly, pressed by disciplined experimentation, rigorous mathematics, insight, and luck. In the heyday of the Wright brothers and the laboratory’s namesake, inventor and researcher Samuel Langley, those with a vision for a flying machine took a “cut and try” approach: make some assumptions, build a plane, try to fly it, and, if you didn’t die in the process, implement what you learned on your next attempt. Aeronautics’ evolution from a wobbly infancy to a strapping adolescence gave rise to the professions of aeronautical engineer and test pilot. Daring men—and with the exception of Ann Baumgartner Carl at Ohio’s Wright Field, they were all men—the test pilots did the “damn fool’s job” of flying an airplane directly into its weak spot. Each time the pilot pushed the aircraft to the limit, identifying how to make a good plane better and a bad plane nonexistent, he risked his own life and the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment.

  A wind tunnel offered many of the research benefits of flight tests but without the danger. The basics of the tool rested on a simple concept, known even to Leonardo da Vinci: air moving at a certain speed over a stationary object was like moving the object through the air at the same speed. At its simplest, a wind tunnel was a big box attached to a big fan. Engineers blasted air over planes, sometimes full-sized vehicles or fractional-scale models, even disembodied wings or fuselages, closely observing how the air flowed around the object in order to extrapolate how the object would fly through the air.

  Most of the work done at Langley was of the “compressed-air” persuasion, research conducted in one of the proliferating number of wind tunnels. The names of the tunnels alone—the Variable-Density Tunnel, the Free-Flight Tunnel, the Two-foot Smoke-Flow Tunnel, the Eleven-inch High-Speed Tunnel—challenged the uninitiated to imagine the combination of pressure, velocity, and dimension that resided therein. The Full-Scale Tunnel’s thirty-by sixty-foot test section opened wide enough to swallow a full-sized plane. Though the West Area’s Sixteen-foot High-Speed Tunnel had an exoskeleton the size of a battleship, the test section—the area where engineers, sitting at a control panel, observed the air flowing over the model—was only the size of a rowboat. But in order to accelerate the air to the necessary speed, giant wooden turbines had to accelerate the blast through the entirety of the tunnel’s circuit.

  Of course, while moving the air over the object was similar to flying through the air, it wasn’t identical, so one of the first concepts Dorothy had to master was the Reynolds number, a bit of mathematical jujitsu that measured how closely the performance of a wind tunnel came to mimicking actual flight. Mastery of the Reynolds number, and using that knowledge to build wind tunnels that successfully simulated real-world conditions, was the key to the NACA’s success. Running the tunnels during the war presented yet another logistical challenge, as the local power company rationed electricity. The NACA nuts ran their giant turbines into the wee hours if necessary, engineers pressing the machines for answers to their research questions like night owls on the hunt for mice. Residents who lived near Langley complained about the sleep-disrupting roar of the tunnels. If they’d known more about the nature of the work behind the noise, and the successes being chalked up by the strange folks next door, the neighbors might have asked for a tour.

  No organization came close to Langley in terms of the quality and range of wind tunnel research data and analysis. The laboratory also possessed the best flight research engineers, who worked closely with test pilots, sometimes as passengers in the vehicle itself, to capture data from planes in free flight. As Dorothy learned—the West Area Computers received many assignments from the lab’s Flight Research Division—it was not good enough to say that a plane flew well or badly; engineers now quantified a given vehicle’s performance against a nine-page checklist under the three broad categories of longitudinal stability and control (up-and-down motion), lateral stability and control (side-to-side motion), and stalling (sudden loss of lift, flight’s life force). The raw data from the work of these “fresh-air” engineers also found a home on Dorothy’s desk.

  What total war and the American production miracle drew into sharp relief—and what Dorothy soon learned—was the fact that an airplane wasn’t one machine for a single purpose: it was a terrifically complex bundle of physics that could be tweaked to serve the needs of different situations. Like Darwin’s finches, the mechanical birds had begun to differentiate themselves, branching into distinct species adapted for success in particular environments. Their designations reflected their use: fighters—also called pursuit planes—were assigned letters F or P: for example, the Chance Vought F4U Corsair or the North American P-51 Mustang. The letter C identified a cargo plane like the Douglas C-47 Skytrain, built to transport military goods and troops and, eventually, commercial passengers. B was for bomber, like the mammoth and perfectly named B-29 Superfortress. And X identified an experimental plane still under development, designed for the purpose of research and testing. Planes lost their X designation—the B-29 was the direct descendant of the XB-29—once they went into production.

  The same evolutionary forces prevailed to replicate a particular model’s positive traits and breed out excess drag and instability. The P-51A Mustang was a good plane; the P-51B and P-51C were great planes. After several rounds of refinement in the Langley wind tunnels, the Mustang achieved its apotheosis with the P-51D. Discoveries large and small contributed to the speed, maneuverability, and safety of the machine that symbolized the power and potential of an America that was ascending to a position of unparalleled global dominance. As the war approached its peak, every single American military airplane in production was based fundamentally—and in many cases in specific detail—upon the research results and recommendations of the NACA.

  Regardless of whether the engineers conducted a test in a wind tunnel or in free flight, the output was the same: torrents, scads, bundles, reams, masses, mounds, jumbles, piles, and goo-gobs of numbers. Numbers from manometers, measuring the pressures distributed along a wing. Numbers from strain gauges, measuring forces acting on various parts of the plane’s structure. If something needed to be measured and the instrument didn’t exist, the engineers invented it, ran the test, and sent the numbers to the computers, along with instructions for what equations to use to process the data. The only groups that didn’t run numbers based on testing worked in the small Theoretical and Physical Research Division and the Stability Research Division—the “no-air” engineers. Rather than drawing conclusions based on direct observation of a plane’s performance, these engineers used mathematical theorems to model what the compressed-air engineers observed in wind tunnels and what the fresh-air engineers took to the skies to understand. The no-air girls came to think of themselves as “a cut above those that did nothing but work the machines.”

  What Marge passed along to Dorothy and the women of West Computing was usually a small portion of a larger task, the work by necessity carved up into smaller pieces and distributed for quick, efficient, and accurate processing. By the time the work trickled down to the computer’s desk, it might be just a set of equations and eye-blearing numbers disembodied from all physical significance. She might not hear another word about the work until a piece appeared in Air Scoop or Aviation or Air Trails. Or never. For many men, a computer was a piece of living hardware, an appliance that inhaled one set of figures and exhaled another. Once a girl fin
ished a particular job, the calculations were whisked away into the shadowy kingdom of the engineers. “Woe unto thee if they shall make thee a computer,” joked a column in Air Scoop. “For the Project Engineer will take credit for whatsoever thou doth that is clever and full of glory. But if he slippeth up, and maketh a wrong calculation, or pulleth a boner of any kind whatsoever, he shall lay the mistake at thy door when he is called to account and he shall say, ‘What can you expect from girl computers anyway?’ ”

  Now and again, however, when a NACA achievement was so important that the news made the popular press, as was the case with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, everyone got to take a victory lap. Newspapers wrote about the Superfortress and its exploits with the kind of fawning adoration accorded movie stars like Cary Grant. It was one of the planes that crossed over from being the love object of flyers and aviation insiders to a broadly known symbol of US technological prowess and bravery. The XB-29 model had logged more than a hundred hours in the laboratory’s Eight-foot High-Speed Tunnel.

  “There is no one in the Laboratory who should feel that he or she did not have a part in the bombing of Japan,” Henry Reid said to the lab’s employees. “The engineers who assisted, the mechanics and modelmakers who did their share, the computers who worked up the data, the secretaries who typed and retyped the results, and the janitors and maids who kept the tunnel clean and suitable for work all made their contribution for the final bombing of Japan.”

  For seven months Dorothy Vaughan had apprenticed as a mathematician, growing more confident with the concepts, the numbers, and the people at Langley. Her work was making a difference in the outcome of the war. And the devastation Henry Reid described . . . she had a part in that as well. Honed to a razor’s edge by the women and men at the laboratory—flying farther, faster, and with a heavier bomb load than any plane in history—B-29s dropped precision bombs over the country of Japan from high in the sky. They brought destruction at close range with incendiary bombs, and they released annihilation—and a new, modern fear—with the atomic bombs they delivered. War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA’s work—more intense and interesting than she ever would have imagined—would remain her work for the duration. And until the war ended, whenever that might be, Dorothy would be one of the NACA nuts.