How have we never heard of this? (By which I mean the story, not the movie. Well, that too.)
Hidden Figures, from 2016, rated PG.
Despite some problems I had with details of how the story was told, this gets a big thumbs-up from me.
- Taraji P. Henson...............Katherine Johnson neé Gobels
- Octavia Spencer................Dorothy Vaughan
- Kevin Costner..................Al Harrison
- Jim Parsons....................Paul Stafford
- Janelle Monáe..................Mary Jackson
In 1957, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union started when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Then, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. That was unacceptable to the government and many of the people of the United States, and it became a national priority to catch and surpass them. A month later, Alan Shepard went to space in a very short flight.
Rocketing into space was much harder back then. Al Harrison was in charge of a roomful of engineers who were working on getting it done. In addition to building and testing space capsules, they drew lots of charts and graphs showing how the rocket would go up and how, when, and where the capsule would come down.
Doing the math was boring and beneath the notice of the (male, white) engineers, so it was done by a gaggle of (female, black)[1] computers who worked in a separate building far across the campus of NASA's Langley Research Center. The problems would be sent over in large binders, much arithmetic and geometry and trigonometry (spherical coordinates!) would be done —by hand—and the solutions would come back later.
At some point, the major character in the movie, a computer named Katherine, was reassigned to work over in the Space Task Group (the engineers), but still doing the same work. Her mathematical skill was legend, but still that's all she was. The racism of the day was on full display. Someone even set up a small percolator labelled "Colored", so that she wouldn't drink the coffee from the big urn.
In one of the scenes that I saw somewhere and made me buy a copy of the movie, Harrison needed something quick and Johnson wasn't at her desk. He asks the room, "where is Katherine?". She then walks in, wet from the rain, and he says "Where do you go all the time?" She answers "the bathroom". He's nonplussed at that, and she explains that the only facilities available to her are in the computers' building, so a couple of times a day she has to run over there. She can't use the convenient bicycles because of the dresses and high heels all computers are required to wear. We then cut to him taking a crowbar to the sign over the colored women's restroom.[2]
As the race to get an American into orbit pressured everyone, her skill became apparent and she started working on the problem of how to deorbit the spacecraft to get it to splash down at the right place for the Navy to pick it up. When John Glenn was preparing to launch in Friendship 7, there was some question as to whether the figures coming out of "the IBM machine" were correct, and he insisted that "that smart woman" work the problem. (He had toured the facility earlier and met her then. "What do you do for us?" "I compute your trajectories.")
A second major character, Dorothy, was a coworker with Katherine. She was continually being seen to be very good at managing the computing group, but repeatedly rebuffed by NASA in her quest to become a supervisor. After the IBM was installed, it was said that it would be the end of human computers. She secretly got a book from the city library (though she had to casually "borrow" it because it was only available in the White section) and started learning FORTRAN. At the end of the movie, she was shown to be the supervisor of the new cadre of women who would support (operate, program) the machine, all of which were female and most probably from her former team, though there was at least one white woman in the group.
And the third named computer in the story, Mary Jackson, was shown to be fighting the system to be allowed to attend an all-white school to take classes needed for an engineering job at NASA. The movie shows her winning a court case to that end, and IRL she did eventually become an engineer.
Being born in 1960, the problem with racism in the United States was still in full swing, though I wasn't aware of it. Watching this movie, it really struck (and disgusted) me how prevalent it was. And how it was so embedded in people's consciousness (the white ones, anyway), that they knew of it but it just seemed like how things were; that they didn't see the problems that such overt and everyday segregation caused. It just didn't occur to anybody that there was no bathroom that Katherine could use. A cynic would say that Harrison's taking down the sign was a way to reduce inefficiency in his working group, but it also showed that it opened his eyes a bit. Later, he saw the sign on the coffee pot and removed it.
The name of the movie? I'm pretty sure the official meaning is that the math was done out of sight. But it's not a stretch to see a second meaning that it was done by invisible women.
Oh, one other thing: At the age of 97, Katherine was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barak Obama.
[1] They were never shown, but I'm sure there were white computers also (still female). There was a sign in the room saying "Colored Computers".
[2] While that was a moving scene, it didn't really solve the problem because it was still in the distant building. The movie didn't address how that helped her when she was working in the engineering center.