In The 1940s, These Ladies Were NASA's Computer-Power

Before modern computers worked a foothold into science and research, number crunching was accomplished by real, human brains. These tasks were often foisted off onto women as the general opinion was that men were too easily distracted to undertake such a focused, repetitive task.

Read on the rest of our tribute to these early human computers originally published for International Women's Day in 2014.


1940s Computer-Power

For International Women's Day, flashback to the early days of NASA. Fundamental research in aerodynamics using wind tunnels and the very earliest push into supersonic flight are piling up stacks of data. All that data went through computers, the women who performed data transcription and reduction.

Computers of the NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit. Standing left to right: Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth, Lilly Ann Bajus, Roxanah Yancey, Emily Stephens, Jane Collons (Procurement), Leona Corbett (Personnel), and Angel Dunn. Kneeling left to right: Dorothy (Dottie) Crawford Roth, Dorothy Clift Hughes, and Gertrude (Trudy) Wilken Valentine.


This photo dates from the Dryden Flight Research Center, back when NASA was still NACA. These women translated oscillographs into numbers for analysis. After extracting, calculating, and reducing the data from aircraft instruments into a useable format, they handed it off to aerospace research engineers for analysis.

Not every day involved giant, grinning snowmen (or having staff BBQs). Most days, being a computer meant long days at a light-table trying to decipher grainy photographic film. Roxanah Yancey directed her team of computers, and was responsible for ensuring accurate calculations were made form the long strips of test flight data accumulated during research flights out of the station. As more and more tests were flown, a call went out to gather computers from Langley, Lewis, and Ames laboratories.


From the left: Geraldine Mayer and Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth with Friden calculators on the their desks; Emily Stephens conferring with engineer John Mayer; Gertrude (Trudy) Valentine is working on an oscillograph recording reducing the data from a flight. Across the desk is Dorothy Clift Hughes using a slide rule to complete data calculations. Roxanah Yancey completes the picture as she fills out engineering requests for further data.

Why were computers almost exclusively women? Partly for the same reason Pickering hired them: they were far cheaper to employ than men. The caption at the NASA archive offers an alternate explanation, "at least part of the rationale seems to have been the notion that the work was long and tedious, and men were not thought to have the patience to do it." The women are bad at math idiocy is a recent occurrence: 1940s women were all about slide rules. Working as a computer in this pre-OSHA era meant long hours hunched over a light table, squinting at tiny images. The result was that most computers who didn't start out wearing glasses eventually ended up with them.


Without the NACA computers, developing air foils shaping wings and propellers couldn't have happened. Today I offer my thanks to Yancey and her team, some of the hidden women in the history of space flight.

Photographs and captions from the NASA/Dryden archives E49-0212 and E49-0053