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

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      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 NACAites 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 finished 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.