1962 · Mechanical Desk Calculator · Work 956 of 1,871
An office of a research centre in Hampton in Virginia on a December morning, a grey steel desk below half-drawn venetian blinds, at its left a heavy grey mechanical calculating machine with ten columns of round cream keys, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a carriage with small dark windows across its top, the casing plain grey, at the desk the woman, an African American woman of forty-four with short wavy dark hair and glasses, in a white short-sleeved blouse, a pencil above wide sheets of faint ruled columns, a celestial globe soft behind her.
Who
Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was an American mathematician who calculated flight paths at NASA for the first crewed space flights. Born on 26 August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, she skipped several grades and graduated from West Virginia State College with highest honours in 1937. She taught at a school for Black children; in 1939 she was one of the first three Black students admitted to the graduate school of West Virginia University. In 1953 she joined the Langley laboratory of NACA, NASA's predecessor, in the West Area Computing section, and after two weeks moved to flight research. She did the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's flight in May 1961 and checked the orbital calculations for John Glenn's flight in 1962. Later she worked on Apollo, the Space Shuttle and the ERTS Earth observation satellite. In 1960 she became the first woman in her division credited as an author of a research report, and in all she was named on 26. She retired in 1986 after 33 years. In 2015, aged 97, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died on 24 February 2020, aged 101.
The moment
On 7 December 1962 Bob Nye, a photographer at the Langley research centre, photographed Katherine Johnson at her desk. NASA lists the image as "Katherine G. Johnson at Work". She sits with a pencil over wide sheets of number columns; to her left stands a heavy mechanical Monroe calculator with a full keyboard, behind it a transparent celestial globe, and venetian blinds hang at the windows. With desk calculators like this she had, a little over a year earlier in the autumn of 1961, checked the re-entry calculations for John Glenn's flight. Glenn had asked for "the girl" to rerun the new IBM computer's results on the old machines; the work took about two weeks. The work does not show those weeks but the ordinary working day in December 1962 that the photograph records.
The other side
The computing section Johnson joined in 1953 was a separate unit for Black women; the laboratory had set it up along racial lines. In 1961 Glenn did not want to trust his life to a computer alone and relied on a mathematician whom the laboratory had placed in that very segregated group eight years before. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom only at 97. The film "Hidden Figures" sharpened her story along the way: according to the curator Michael Neufeld, Glenn never called from the launch pad shortly before lift-off to ask for a recalculation.
What the sources leave open: The photograph of 7 December 1962 is black and white; the colours in the picture are assumed, as is the time of day. What Johnson was calculating that day, and whether the shot was posed, is not recorded. Her face follows this photograph. The picture deliberately leaves out the maker's name on the machine and the figures in the tables. NASA's biography places Glenn's request for the check in 1962, Neufeld in the autumn of 1961.