![]() A century of progress in the air and in spaceĪmerica’s journey into space began not in 1958, when NASA was established, but in 1915. It’s the surprising and hitherto untold story of Black women in the space race. These were the Black women profiled so ably in Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book, Hidden Figures. ![]() A single equation they worked with might take up “the better part of a page.” The solution to a problem in aeronautics could run to as many as ten pages. They were academically qualified mathematicians. But these women were not entry-level data entry staff, their fingers dancing over the keys of adding machines. Employed by the thousand in the US war effort in World War II, they crunched the numbers and ran the equations to calculate the effects of wind on aircraft and the trajectory of artillery shells and torpedoes. ![]() ![]() Nearly all of them were women, and many were Black. Before UNIVAC, before the IBM 650, computers were people. ![]()
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