![]() ![]() However, engineers need support: craftsmen, mechanics, and number-crunchers to process the information gathered from those experiments. In the last two years, America has become the leading producer of airplanes, largely thanks to the experiments done by the NACA engineers at Langley. ![]() The demands of World War II have left a limited labor force to address the growing need for airplanes, and Langley’s staff has grown from 500 to around 1,500 in the last four years-many of them women. In May 1943, Melvin Butler is the personnel officer at Langley, and he urgently needs to hire people. ![]() Even though she knew there would be many of these brilliant women, she is surprised to find stories of around a thousand female computers, both white and black, who made Hampton, Virginia, into Spacetown, USA, and put America at the forefront of aeronautics. The spark of curiosity about these largely unremembered women “soon became an all-consuming fire” for Shetterly, and that fire powered the narrative of Hidden Figures. She reconnects with many of the black families she knew growing up, including multiple black women who worked at Langley as “human computers”-mathematicians who performed complex number-crunching for the engineers at Langley starting in 1943 (white female computers were hired in 1935). In the prologue, Margot Lee Shetterly describes visiting her hometown of Hampton, Virginia, in the winter of 2010. ![]()
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