Hidden Figures

Black readers follow the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen in the press. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and the 332nd Fighter Group make headlines flying fighter planes. They fly Bell P-39 Airacobras, then Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and then, by the summer of 1944, North American P-51 Mustangs.

The NACA tries to build planes that will allow them to defeat the Germans from the air, destroying the science that will hand the opposition a military advantage. Langley is one of the United States’ most powerful secret weapons. Henry Reid tells his staff to be on the lookout for spies. Famous people frequent the laboratory: Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracey, and Myrna Loy. Locals call the people who work at Langley “NACA nuts,” “weirdos,” or “brain busters.”

NACA scientists drive salesmen in department stores crazy by doing things like dismantling toasters to check their quality. But people come from all over the country to take entry-level jobs at the NACA, which offers better training and hands-on experience than the best engineering graduate school program in the world. White boys from MIT and Virginia Tech fight to enter the place where Dorothy has already won a spot.

The lab sponsors engineering physics classes for new computers. Two days a week after work, Dorothy and the other new computers take immersion classes in the fundamental theory of aerodynamics. They also attend a weekly two-hour laboratory session for hands-on training in one of the wind tunnels. Dorothy goes from being a teacher at the head of the classroom to a student. She learns about aerodynamics and what makes planes fly.

In the early days of flight, aeronautics evolved quickly. Dorothy, like most people at that time, has never even flown on a plane, so she has a lot to learn. The wind tunnel offers an opportunity to research flight without the danger of death. Engineers blast air over planes or parts of planes, observing how they interact with the air flow. Other tools include the Variable-Density Tunnel, the Free-Flight Tunnel, the Two-Foot Smoke-Flow Tunnel, the Eleven-Inch High-Speed Tunnel and the Sixteen-Foot High-Speed Tunnel. Engineers quantify the performance of planes against a nine-page checklist of features.

Dorothy learns that fighter planes are complicated tools that can be deployed in many different situations on the battlefield. The testing of the planes results in reams of numbers and measurements, which Margerey passes on to Dorothy and other West Computers to process. Sometimes, all Dorothy sees as a result of this testing are columns of equations. Dorothy and the others do the calculations, and then they’re sent back to the engineers, which means the engineers get credit for the work that the computers do—though the computers are, of course, given full credit if they make a mistake.

Either way, Dorothy’s apprentice work as a mathematician is making a difference in the war effort. She also has a part in enabling the U.S. military to carry the heavy bomb loads that the B-29s drop over Japan.