Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot Shetterly Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 swirl 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, СКАЧАТЬ