The film Hidden Figures not only introduced us to the pioneering black women mathematicians of NASA, it introduced us to the huge support team behind each mission, a group that included women engineers since the beginning of the program.
In 1939 Kitty O'Brien Joyner, the first woman to graduate from the University of Virginia's engineering program, was hired as the first woman to work as an engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, now known as NASA's Langley Research Center. The daughter of an engineer, Kitty set her sights on following his footsteps with a civil engineering degree from the University of Virginia. While the school would accept women candidates, they had to first complete two years of college ang be at least 20 years old. After two years at Sweet Biar College she enrolled in the engineering college, joining a class of 160 men and one women.
“At that time there were two bathrooms in the engineering building, one of them labeled ‘MEN’ and the other labeled ‘MISS O’BRIEN,’” her daughter would later recall. While that was a joke, her instructors did guide her away from her original civil engineering major toward electrical, aware that there were few facilities for women on construction sites!
Kitty ‘shined’ in her new major, concentrating on the properties of light and her paper, “Fluorescence, the Light of the Future,” was singled out by The American Institute of Electrical Engineering.
She was among the 38 engineering students who passed their final exams that spring having studied hydraulics, applied mechanics, electronics, and AC and DC machinery.
After her graduation she applied and was hired at The NACA Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, located in Hampton, Virginia, which was building a reputation worldwide for pioneering flight design improvements. The first women engineer hired by NACA, Kitty’s work in the electronic operations of wind tunnels would be crucial to the Allies win in the approaching WW II, propelling modern air travel and laying the groundwork for supersonic flight and the space age.
By 1958 NACA was NASA and space capsules were being tested in her wind tunnels; she would become card-playing friends with NASA’s ‘human computers’ depicted by Hidden Figures and lunch with future astronauts.
Kitty spent her entire career at the federal agency, providing more than 30 years of public service managing subsonic and supersonic facilities and later the Cost Estimating Branch, Office of Engineering and Technical Service before her retirement in 1971.
How did these women impact future mathematicians and engineers? NASA interns share their inspirations for choosing a science career.
While Kitty Joyner was the first female engineer hired by NACA, physicist Pearl Irma Young had been was the backbone of research work since the late ‘20s.
She was born in Minnesota, but grew up in North Dakota where she worked as a domestic to attend high school. She graduated in 1919 as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Dakota with a triple major in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. After graduation Pearl was hired by the university to teach physics, a position usually filled by men.
She took the Civil Service exam for physicists in 1922, expecting to be hired by the Bureau of Standards which then employed the only female physicist working for the entire federal government; instead she was hired by the NACA and sent to the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.
Young began with an assignment to the Instrument Research Division, the section that designed, made and repaired almost all instrumentation on an aircraft. During her first few years on the job, Young assembled and calibrated instrumentation used to measure pressures on aircraft surfaces in flight.
Young soon noted that the young engineers at Langley had poor technical writing abilities; and that someone needed to teach them the mechanics of writing to improve the quality of publications coming from the laboratory. As Langley’s first Chief Technical Editor she hired a qualified staff and created an oversight system to approve the technical documents that described the exciting technical accomplishments of Langley. All prospective documents extensively vetted by a panel of engineering peers and reviewed in detail by her editorial staff, insisting that all reports be checked and rechecked for consistency, logical analysis, and absolute accuracy.
In 1943, she published a document entitled “Style Manual for Engineering Authors,” which served as the guiding document for the more than 16,000 research reports NACA generated and distributed to laboratories, libraries, factories, and military installations around the world. Pearl Young’s efforts burnished the public image of the NACA as one of the preeminent aeronautical research institutions in the world. and influenced the way aeronautical engineers would share their ideas and results. Many elements of her Style Manual are still used today.
Young never married, although she was godmother to Kitty Joyner’s children, and she devoted her free time to writing, teaching and traveling. She toured aircraft research laboratories in Germany and England and she was a passenger on the dirigible Hindenburg for its first west-to-east flight in 1936.
In recognition of her contributions to the NACA and NASA, Langley Research Center named a new auditorium in her honor in 1995, later replaced by a new Pearl Young Theater in a new campus building where it serves as a main point for meetings at Langley.
From mathematicians, to engineers and astronauts, learn about the women of NASA, fifteen ground-breaking women scientists who helped shape our space program.
