In the past few weeks, I have read three outstanding books about science, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and the role women have played in them in the past 150 years.
Before the advent of electronic computational machines, a computer was a human using a pencil and paper, perhaps with a slide rule, later with a mechanical calculator. This work often involved churning out tables of logarithms, roots, and trigonometric functions. Occasionally calculators were used to compute something more interesting like how far away is that star; or how to get John Glen back from space; or how to send a probe out to visit Jupiter, Saturn Neptune and Uranus on the cheap.
Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe begins with the women computers at Harvard shortly after the Civil War. Several Nobel prizes have their origins in the work of these women. The glass photographic plates, hence the name of the book, contained spectrographic data on stars taken over time by Harvard’s various telescopes. It was the women computers who analyzed this data and were responsible for many of the astronomical discoveries of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. When a star or galaxy is said to be X many billion light years from our galaxy, it is because of these women.
Hidden Figures is probably the most famous of the books since it has been made into an excellent Oscar nominated movie. Margo Lee Shetterly engages us with the personal stories of the women of NASA’s Space Task Group before there was even a NASA. These women were combating not only the sexism that women in STEM fields face, they were African-American women in staunchly segregationist Virginia. Not only with pencil and paper did they plot the trajectories of the Mercury and other space missions, they also became some of the first computer programmers in NASA.
The last of the three that I read was Nathalia Holt’s Rise of the Rocket Girls. While Shetterly’s book is focused on Langley, VA, Holt’s female rocket scientists are at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in CA. She blends the work of JPL’s projects with the lives of the principal figures and the changing times of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Shetterly brings the lives and impact of the women in the book all the way up to the present.
All three authors tell engaging stories on both scientific and human levels. They are a wonderful triptych of human curiosity, the changing role of women in science, and the history of science.