What Are The Similarities Between Dorothy Johnson's Life And Accomplishments
By: Sarah Gabriel
Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008) Dorothy Vaughan was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1910, but later moved to West Virginia. She graduated from Beechurst High School in 1925. At the young age of 19 this intelligent woman graduated from Wilberforce University with her B.A. in mathematics. Executive Order 8802 was the first law ever past to prohibit racial discrimination in the workplaces on a federal level of the United States, and executive order 9346 built off of 8802 by widening its jurisdiction to all federal agencies, in addition to those directly involved in defense. These two new laws allowed Dorothy to be hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). While working …show more content…
From a very young age her father could tell that she was a very smart girl. By the time Katherine was 10 years old she was in high school, and by the time she was 13 she had already made it to college where she graduated at the age of 18 with highest honors in 1937. To add onto her list of extraordinary accomplishments Katherine was later (1939) the first handpicked, African-American female to attend West Virginia State, along with two other males, as part of an integration …show more content…
After only two weeks of working for NACA she was assigned to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division by none other than Dorothy Vaughan. While she was there she analyzed flight testing data, and when she was found to excel in her work she was placed in the research division permanently. This astonishing woman was the one responsible for the trajectory analysis on America’s first spaceship; in short, she was America’s backbone against Russia in the “Space Race”. The men that put their lives on the line to be in space would refuse to even make an attempt without her analysis of the numbers.
“As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine 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
Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (September 20, 1910 – November 10, 2008) Dorothy Vaughan was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1910, but later moved to West Virginia. She graduated from Beechurst High School in 1925. At the young age of 19 this intelligent woman graduated from Wilberforce University with her B.A. in mathematics. Executive Order 8802 was the first law ever past to prohibit racial discrimination in the workplaces on a federal level of the United States, and executive order 9346 built off of 8802 by widening its jurisdiction to all federal agencies, in addition to those directly involved in defense. These two new laws allowed Dorothy to be hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). While working …show more content…
From a very young age her father could tell that she was a very smart girl. By the time Katherine was 10 years old she was in high school, and by the time she was 13 she had already made it to college where she graduated at the age of 18 with highest honors in 1937. To add onto her list of extraordinary accomplishments Katherine was later (1939) the first handpicked, African-American female to attend West Virginia State, along with two other males, as part of an integration …show more content…
After only two weeks of working for NACA she was assigned to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division by none other than Dorothy Vaughan. While she was there she analyzed flight testing data, and when she was found to excel in her work she was placed in the research division permanently. This astonishing woman was the one responsible for the trajectory analysis on America’s first spaceship; in short, she was America’s backbone against Russia in the “Space Race”. The men that put their lives on the line to be in space would refuse to even make an attempt without her analysis of the numbers.
“As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine 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