![]() ![]() ![]() The relations of 1960s black politics, culture and space were much more complicated, and interesting, than Hidden Figures has time to show in its equation of breaking the chains of gravity and of prejudice. You know, the man just upped my rent last night In 1970, in response to the Apollo landings, Gil Scott-Heron spoke of the contrast between two worlds in his song “ Whitey on the Moon”: One is almost left thinking that after 1961-2, when the key events of Hidden Figures take place, the racial politics of space and technology had been settled. The “coloured bathroom” sign is smashed to the ground. NASA is portrayed very positively too, with the initially hostile white staff learning to respect their co-workers. Hidden Figures is, certainly, inspirational. Johnson rescues John Glenn’s mission to be the first American to orbit the planet – although is then faced with technological redundancy.ĭorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). Vaughan marches her black women computers to equal status. Jackson persuades a judge to overturn the racist strictures on Virginia schooling. The three protagonists win all their battles (with one notable, bittersweet and significant exception). There is no “coloured bathroom”, and Johnson has to run, humiliatingly, back and forth across the NASA campus. Her talent admits her to the Space Task Group, the elite backroom boys tasked with the Mercury calculations, but even then the indignities of racial prejudice follow. Johnson is the genius, the former child prodigy, the woman who can calculate trajectories that no-one else can compute. When she takes her children to the library, the books she needs – such as one on the programming language FORTRAN – are in the whites-only section. Vaughan is doing the job of supervisor of the team of black women “computers” but is repeatedly denied fair recognition. This immensely engaging feature film extends the point further: the crucial “computers” here are human and female, and black. Hidden Figures, released in the UK on February 17, is based on the true story of three women working at NASA in the 1960s, and the subject of a book by Margot Lee Shetterly. In fact, the “job of programmer”, says Light, “originated as feminised clerical labour”. Nearly 200 women contributed to this aim of speeding up calculation, and six were directly involved with the novel task of “programming” the ENIAC. The job of operating the ENIAC, a giant electronic calculator built to churn out ballistic tables in the Second World War, was undertaken by a female workforce. More pertinently, Jennifer Light has argued that these computers were women. NASA announced in May that it plans to land Americans back on the moon by 2024 with the Artemis initiative, named after Apollo's twin sister who was goddess of the hunt and the moon.įor the first time, a female astronaut will walk on the moon, NASA said.A few years ago a flurry of excellent historical publications reminded us that the “computer” wasn’t always a box of electronics.ĭavid Alan Grier’s When Computers Were Human (2013) described how the drudgery of repetitive calculation, essential to endeavours such as astronomy or the production of mathematical tables since the 19th century, had been the work, as the title suggested, of human “computers”. July 20 marks the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk by NASA astronauts, one of 11 flights in the Apollo space program of the 1960s and '70s, named after the Greek sun god. Johnson is now 100 and is the last of the three still living. ![]() See more □ - #HiddenFigures /UcGJCd4Oky- 2016 book details the women's struggles as they crunched numbers at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in the pre-computer age. Administrator DC Council Chair and “Hidden Figures” author unveil the “Hidden Figures Way” street sign at a dedication ceremony this morning.
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