There was an African-American girl called Dorothy Vaughn who was born in 1910. She was very good at her studies and did well through college and she went on to become a professor in mathematics. In 1943 Dorothy joined NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. They had a wing for mathematicians. These were the days before computers so actually human beings did all the calculations of how to put spacecrafts into the orbit out of the Earth’s atmosphere, flight trajectories, re-entry paths, how much heating was done, etc. everything was done by hand by a set of mathematicians. Now this was the time when there was gender and racial segregation. There was a wing called the West Wing Advisory Committee which was full of only African-American women and Dorothy was part of that fantastic group which was really relied upon to do everything. In 1958 NACA went on to become what is NASA now and in about 1961 one day Dorothy saw that in a big room that had been prepared for some days a huge machine was brought in. It was brought in by some technicians from a company called IBM. The ever curious Dorothy kept asking people what this machine was and she was told that this was a computer. But Dorothy and her team were actually called computers because they did computing and now there was a machine called the computer. Every evening after work she spent time with these technicians from IBM to understand what this could do and very soon she realized that all the work she and her team were doing, all the complex mathematical work would be soon replaced with this machine. This would disrupt her world, her team and everything. Without telling her team she started figuring out more about this machine. She was curious and she became the first person in NASA who could even put on this computer. Then she figured out that for this computer to do all that mathematical activity would need programmers and she found out the programming language used was called Fortran. So Dorothy went to a public library but in the coloured section she couldn’t find any book on Fortran. So she went off to the white section and she found a book, but very soon the librarian came and threw her out. She wasn’t supposed to be there. When she went into the bus and was travelling home she quietly took out the book from under her coat. She had stolen the book and then she went on to self-teach herself Fortran spending evenings in the computer when no one was there she then decided to teach her whole team of 30 African-American brilliant mathematician women the new language called Fortran. When NASA announced that they were going to hire programmers to program this machine, Dorothy put up her hand and said you don’t have to hire programmers your human computers already know this language. So they went and started running this computer and Dorothy became the centre head for running this computer. Dorothy and her team went on to assist many missions including Apollo 11. Dorothy finally retired in 1971 and is even today regarded as one of the heroes of NASA who helped NASA go ahead in the space war. This story was brought to the public in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book, “Hidden Figures” which then went on to become a movie starring Octavia Spencer. What a beautiful story! Business Points ( Tags ) #storytelling #business #bestseller #stories #changemanagement #Organisationalchange #machines #AI #ManoverMachine #discrimination #initiativetaking
