Women's History Month: Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson, 1918-2020

Katherine Johnson broke both racial and gender barriers. During a period when many African Americans stopped their schooling after eighth grade, Johnson finished high school and college by the age of eighteen and later went on to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University. She graduated from West Virginia State College with degrees in mathematics and French. She began graduate school but left after one year to devote time to her family.

Johnson went to work for NASA (which was called NACA until 1958) in 1953. She was a "human computer", performing calculations for missions that sent an astronaut into orbit around Earth and successfully landed humans on the moon. She was the only woman in the Flight Research Division. You can read about her many achievements but this is perhaps the most famous. As told by Margot Lee Shetterly on Johnson's NASA bigraphy page:

"In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space".

She retired from NASA in 1986.

In 2016 a book by Margot Lee Shetterly was published: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. The book follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked for NACA/NASA as computers (which was their job title). The book was adapted into a film with the same name in 2016. If you haven't seen it, you should!

Resources

Rohland, Lindsay. “Katherine Johnson.” Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia, 2020. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=ers&AN=125600082&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=ath2 

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