CHAPTER 1 GET THE GIRL Everyone was watching her It was a chilly morning in February 1962 Katherine Johnson glanced up from her calculations to see a crowd of anxious white men surrounding her desk Each man was leaning forward trying to catch a glimpse of her work Her pencil danced across the graph paper She jotted long strings of numbers that stretched to impossible lengths Finally Johnson’s pencil stopped Her eyes darted across the numbers once and then twice With a sigh she smiled and leaned back in her chair Katherine Johnson The crowd of men inside the Space Task Group office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Langley Aeronautical Research Lab instantly broke up The room erupted into a frenzy of chatter Several men picked up their desk phones to report the news Johnson had confirmed the numbers That meant astronaut John Glenn would be safe to fly More than 850 miles away from Johnson’s desk in Langley Virginia Glenn nervously walked across the sun-baked launch pad in Florida’s Cape Canaveral
He looked up at a towering rocket On the very top sat a tiny metal capsule his spaceship Glenn was preparing to become the first American to orbit Earth If all went well his ship would zoom three times around the planet It would exceed speeds of 17,000 miles per hour That part wasn’t what was bothering Glenn He was worried about how or if he could get his ship back home Space flight was extremely precise It relied on countless complex mathematical equations If Glenn didn’t direct his ship back down to Earth at the exact right moment speed and angle he was doomed His ship could bounce off Earth’s dense atmosphere and skip out into space Or it would land in the wrong spot If it didn’t splash down in a deep ocean it could be crushed upon impact Glenn knew that NASA had used its new IBM computer to calculate the details of his flight This room-sized machine was supposedly able to perform calculations faster and better than any human But Glenn just didn’t trust it He was a test pilot A man who followed his gut Right now his gut told him he needed the best brains at NASA to confirm the numbers He knew who he wanted to do the job an African-American woman he’d seen in some of his preflight meetings He didn’t know her name but that didn’t matter He’d told his team Get the girl to check the numbers If she says the numbers are good I’m ready to go 1 Glenn understood that his behavior might raise red flags NASA expected him to toe the agency line He needed to follow orders He needed to perform his duties And he needed to help the United States win the race to space It was one thing for an astronaut to ask for a double check of numbers It was another thing entirely to ask for a black woman to do the job Just then Glenn looked up Two NASA technicians were jogging
across the launch pad toward him smiling broadly Glenn knew Katherine Johnson must have done the math Glenn laughed quietly and looked at the sky He was going to space Astronaut John Glenn orbited Earth in Friendship 7 On February 20 1962 John Glenn blasted off He completed three Earth orbits before safely splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean Glenn was celebrated as an American hero He was the star of parades parties and countless news stories One hundred thirty-five million people had watched his mission on TV Johnson wasn’t invited to any parades She was not the guest of honor at any fabulous parties Few members of her own community in nearby Hampton Virginia even knew what she had done None of this was terribly surprising to Johnson She was an African-American human computer She was used to being absolutely essential but also unseen
And yet NASA employed hundreds of female mathematicians as human computers Some were white Others were black These computers performed the math that the engineers needed to build fly and track air and spacecraft Over decades of clumsy trial and error NASA had learned to rely on these women to do its math They were excellent mathematicians In fact a 1942 agency memo stated that the engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could 2 And as an added benefit letting the human computers do the math helped the engineers spend their time dreaming up new types of spacecraft Johnson never complained about being ignored She knew she was lucky to be at NASA And though some at NASA might not admit it the agency was lucky to have her Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician She was born in 1918 and grew up in a small town in West Virginia Most of the African American girls at that time left school after eighth grade Becoming a professional mathematician was a career few people in her hometown pursued But Johnson was different She turned her passion for numbers into a vocation Johnson had always focused on math She was drawn to numbers even as a young child I counted everything she recalled I counted the steps to the road the steps up to church the number of dishes and silverware I washed anything that could be counted I did 3 Her parents and teachers recognized Johnson’s talent They encouraged the young girl to work hard With their help Johnson flew through school She skipped grades to graduate high school at age 14 She graduated from West Virginia State College at age 18 with the highest honors After college she got married and had children She then worked
