Margaret talks with Bridget Todd about the space race, Russian cosmists, gay scientists, and the women who got humanity to the moon.
Chloe, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? Your favorite podcast? That well, it's actually just your favorite podcast. UM. I know you love all of your podcasts equally, but basic you love this one a little bit more. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm ready to tell you all about cool people. And one of those cool people I'm going to tell you about is this week's guest, Bridget Todd, who is a feminist and activist and the host of the show There Are No Girls on the Internet, which is also allowed to be your favorite podcast. How are you doing, Bridget, I'm good. I'm so excited to be here. And we've got Sophie on the call to Um, how are you Sophie as our producer, How are you doing, Sophie? I'm doing I'm doing, Margaret. That's all I got for you. Yeah. Okay, So today I want to talk about computers and space, and I'm gonna call this episode When Women Were Computers, because we're going to talk about how computer used to be a job description. But when I started looking into that, I started turning up more and more weird ship. So, in addition to this being a story about women computers, both white and black. It's also about abolitionist astronomers, religious fanatics who are trying to raise the dead as well as explore the universe, bisexual goth rockets, scientists, and a gay man who saved millions of lives in World War Two and was oppressed as hell by the government that he just saved. And I'm sure I'm leaving more stuff out. It's a weird story today, but I think it's gonna be a cool one to bear with me. Oh, this is right up my alley. I love talking about how women used to be the the o g computers like us, you know, yeah, I like, I don't even know. I was probably in my thirties when I figured out that computer was used to be a job description, and I grew up a like computer kid, you know, I was like interested in computers from whatever. Anyway, I want to start with a quote from Stephen J. Gould, who was an evolutionary biolog just a science educator. And it's a quote people have heard before, but I feel like it's relevant to kind of frame what we're talking about today. I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than then the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops, and because so the show cool people who did cool stuff, it's it's not about heroes. Like I don't want to just be like this person is the single best person anytime I'm talking about someone. And I really basically hate the great man theory of history that says that history was just moved forward by single spectacular individuals. Rather, I really like that the accurate story, which is that ship gets done by a thousand hands doing the work together and um including spectacular individuals, but it's not solely them, and it's absolutely not them working alone. So like, I don't know, Einstein was smart at fun, right, but he wasn't the only person as smart as fuck. And there are so many people who are artists funk who are prevented by systemic barriers from exercising their talents and contributing in the way that they would otherwise be able to. So today I'm basically excited to talk about smartest fun people who had to push past systemic barriers and then advanced human knowledge by leaps and bounds. I love that. I love that idea that I don't know. There's something about engaging with history in this way where the people that you admire have to be hero figures. I understand the inclination to to lionize and hero eze these people, but then you have this really surface engagement with them, like you don't. They don't get to be the full, messy, flog, complex, dynamic people that we know they are. They get to be like a stick around a notebook, right, And how boring is that? Yeah? Totally yeah, and like and the warts and all thing kind of like keeps us locked out of it because we're like, oh, well, I'm not as cool as that person because I did bad stuff when I was a teenager, or I don't know, I lose my temper sometimes or whatever the thing is, um, you know, being able to like, yeah, I really want to try and warts in all things as much as I can. And the two biggest warts that need to be talked about before we talk about anything has to do with space are the fact that a lot of what I'm gonna be talking about our accomplishments that are claimed by two nations, neither of which do I have any love for. One of those nations is the United States of America, and one of them is the the USSRUM. I love the just straight up like fuck the USA energy, you just ground us in. Yeah, and it's not because it's not because I'm like, oh well, if you hate the USA, you love the USSR. Like, no, they're they're both bad things, like hate them both. Yeah, but but cool people within those structures figured out how to advance human knowledge as best as they could. Yeah, I don't know. And so most of these people get talked about in patriotic terms. But as far as I can tell, most of these people, and I'll mark some who did, most of these people did not see things in patriotic terms. They saw things basically. I mean, they care about science by and large more than anything else. But I'm I'm cutting curious, Bridget, since you you do a lot of work around this sort of thing, Like, how do you handle talking about people who do good things within bad frameworks? You know, like like people like now we're all stock working these capitalist jobs and things like that, or you know, all the science that ends up being used by governments, by by forces of colonization and all that. Ship. Yeah, what a good question. I think it's really complicated and I guess I try to remember kind of like you just pointed out, Margaret, that we're talking about people within systems, right, So like I'm an anti capitalist. I don't really funk with our government like that, Like I'm consider myself a radical, but I'm still living in the United States, and so I still have to engage in commerce. They still have to, you know, do all the machinations that come with living in a white supremacist like how Herrow patriarchy fucked up society, and so I just try to I I'm it's really easy for me to give myself that grace, and I tried to extend that to the people that I'm like reading about and and hearing about and learning about, because you know, there are also individuals who did cool ship, but we're trapped within systems that are very oppressive, and so it's a bummer to see like, oh, this cool ship was used to do something horrible that I don't agree with, but you got to remember that it's like against that backdrop that none of us can really escape. Yeah, um, I was. There's this amazing trans woman named Lynn Conway who is super cool. She's still alive, and she is used to work for IBM back in the fifties, and she is like the person who developed the technology for the cell phone, right, and like she was fired from IBM for being trans and all this stuff, and reading about her story, I was like, wow, I'm so inspired by her, Like what a life. But then I continued reading about her story and it's like, oh, she was designing the pen for the government. Cool cool Google like, But that doesn't mean I admire her and her bravery and her you know, ability to like do cool ship and persevere any less, even though I don't love the fact that, you know, building defense for the government isn't really my cup of tea, right, totally. No, that that that nails it, And I think that's the similar story. Now. I actually want to find out more about this this woman. But um, a lot of the people that are going to end up interwoven into this story have a very you'll learn You'll learn this when you ever I'm talking with Bridget, I end up like spending like four hours googling, and like the best possible way. I'm gonna take that as a compliment, absolutely, all right. So I want to start by going way back in time, just because it's fun. And the first thing that I want to make like really clear to anyone um which I think everyone knows this unless you swallowed a lot of really Eurocentric history, which is that the first people doing complex were not white people. The oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Egypt and Mesopotamia which is modern day Iraq, and there are from the second century BC. The concept of zero was imported into Europe from Africa. China was the first place to make use of negative numbers. To be fair, as far as I can tell, ancient Greece wasn't like terribly far behind, but they, you know, got these ideas from other places, and then the Celts picked some of it up. But but overall, quote unquote Western knowledge is absolutely based on Asian and African knowledge as far as anything I can tell. And then the other thing in which I guess I recovered in the introduction is to know is that the first computers were people. So someone who computes, someone who solves mathematical problems, which a lot of it was about astronomy, a lot of it back in the day. A lot of the first complex math that people were doing was tracking the position of stars, which I like because it ties neatly back into the story that we're gonna be telling today. And the word computer itself dates back to at least six from some really weird quote that I could not figure how to parse, and I like asked the Internet, and the Internet's like, we don't know how to parse this either, some quote about the mortality of man and how God or maybe Moses is the computer who counts your days. Oh yeah, And everyone's like, is this about God or Moses or something, or is it just like some guy who's like counting all your days who just like, I don't know, maybe a profit or something. I'm not sure. Someone listening to this nose and will be very upset that I didn't focus on this particular aspect. But originally it was interchangeable with the word mathematician, until eventually mathematicians started implying someone who was doing the thinking about math and computer was involving someone solving the math, which of course makes a hierarchy. And when you figure out how to make a hierarchy, people figure out how to shove humans onto it based on existing systems of discrimination. So for a computer, they went with one of the classics. Men do the thinking. Women do the solving, which is obviously thinking also, but you know, try explaining that to the patriarch. I love that people were able to get away with saying that solving didn't involve like complex thought evolved. Yeah, they're not doing the higher level thinking about it. I'm like, I can't do either of these things. So and it's actually something that I've noticed in a lot of fields that I've worked in, is that, for example, and publishing and a lot of my work and publishing as a writer, it's a lot of this is not universal and I'm not trying to call out individual publishers, but there's a lot of women doing the back end work and who are to publish men? Right, A lot of the people who make books happen, who are the editors, who are the type setters, who are just doing all the work, not all the work. Writing is work too, but I don't know it, and it it annoys me when I've noticed that publishers work for it annoys me. Yeah, it is annoying, and I see it. I agree with you, and I've seen it in so many places. And I think that labor that we associate with women, it's always going to be devalued. And so even if it's the labor that like literally the thing would not exist without this labor. It is the grease that keeps the wheels running if it's associated with women or somehow like perceived as feminine, and we just don't value it, and that you can see that in I mean everywhere, all all the all the way down. Yeah, no, absolutely, But it took a while for for Western men to actually figure out that they can make women do this work, because they were like not convinced that women were smart enough to do the solving or whatever. So so most computers started off men as far as I can tell, until about the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first one I found, there's no part of me that believes is the first woman computer, even under that name, but the first white english woman Mary Edwards. Mary Edwards was a white english woman born sometimes around seventeen fifty and her husband, John Edwards, was a clergyman who couldn't make ends meet, so in seventeen seventy three he got himself hired by the British Nautical Almanac, among other people, to do astronomical calculations for their almanac. And so he became a computer, which is cool until you realize that probably mostly what he did is make an almac that was used by British sailors to go around and impress people all over the world. But you know, um, the people who can afford to pay people to do the math there often up to no good. So John Edwards he's getting paid as a computer, but he's not a computer. His wife as a computer. His wife is doing all of the computing work. It's possible that he was doing some of it. I'm not sure, but I believe she was doing the majority or all of it. And I actually kind of wonder how many times throughout history this happens, where some man just literally gets the credit in the pay and and sometimes maybe in a mean way, being like ha ha, I'm going to take all the credit. And maybe sometimes it's like a woman is like, all right, well, I can't get any ship done unless I marry this dude and get him to take the credit. You know, So he dies in God only knows what he dies from, probably just from being alive in the eighteenth century, which killed a lot of people young. And when he died, she wrote the Nautical Board a letter and was like, hey, it was actually me the entire time. Can I can I keep having this job? I like having this job? And they said yes, and she became one of the their thirty five computers and the first woman to work under the job title computer, at least in English. Probably a bad sign that I was like, oh wow, Luke said yes, I know, right, really bad, very progressive of But the sad part is it probably was there was probably that's a woman taking credit for her labor and like being able to continue to do it. Who would have thought. There's probably like an entire movies worth of drama that happened around that decision. You know, there's probably like one of the guys was like, I think we should let her do it, and then he like loses his job, but then like the head of it all, his wife is like, I won't suck you until you let him come back, you know whatever. Starring Meryl Streep. Obviously I would watch that and one of the things that was kind of interesting, right You're like, oh, wow, she's and then you're like, oh, she's one of thirty five people doing this work, and this is something that seems to get left out and a lot of the stuff that talks about this is it's less about individual genius, although it is about individual genius, but it's about the collective genius of people getting together and you know, they're checking and rechecking each other's work, and they even end up like splitting problems to work on them as if basically parallel processing all of the mathematical problems, which I think is cool. So her daughter, Eliza Edwards takes up the family business when her mom died, and then she had that job until they centralized the job until London and since she didn't live in London. Uh oh, and then England also passed a bunch of laws making harder for women to find work because progress isn't linear and sometimes people have it better and worse and things get better and then they get worse, which I don't like reminding myself right now. Hopeful. Yeah, pretty grim reminder, especially at today these days. Yeah. Uh well, gay marriage was nice, while no, I'm kidding, we're gonna hold onto it all right. So the first American woman computer I run across is a woman named Maria Mitchell who's also a white woman, and she was born in Nantucket in eighteen eighteen and she had the good fortune to be born into a Quaker family. And usually say the good fortune and kind of a sarcastic way, but this time I'm not being sarcastic. Quakers come up disproportionately on this podcast, or at least in my research, because they're one of the only groups of white people are actually they weren't actually exclusively white, but majority white people in the United States who actually consistently risked their lives to stop slavery, and relevant to today's story, they raised their daughters with the same education and opportunities as they raised their sons. So like, Quakers keep doing cool stuff in history way more than I very disproportionately. Yeah, I funk with Quakers. I've been to Quaker church and it's like cool. Like I'm not religious, but like a Quaker church, their ceremonies are very cool. Like sometimes you sit in silence sometimes and whatever comes to you, you can speak to the group. It's like a very I keep keep being cool Quakers. I like, I like what you're doing. Yeah, no, that's cool. So Maria she grows up into an educated, maybe middle class family. Her her mom is a library worker and her father is a school teacher who's into amateur astronomy. Apparents like ten fucking kids, and they still found the time to teach her all kinds of weird astronomical devices and math ship. When she was twelve, she helped her dad calculate the solar eclipse, and then she grew up to be even cooler. When she was seventeen, she founded a school for girls, and the first girls that she took in were three quote Portuguese girls, which was slang for immigrant women of color, regardless of what nationality. And since schools weren't integrated, basically, by by teaching these three girls, she knew that like the rich white women and we're going to send their kids to her school. And she did it anyway or whatever, just like one of these like wow, you passed this like bare minimum bar, you know, like I don't know, I mean it's like, I mean, get back then. It probably was like a very like a very cool radical thing to do. Yeah, no, totally. But the downside is that since she's seventeen when she starts this school, she's a teenager, and so she pretty quickly gets bored I think of teaching. Uh so I don't know, when she's eighteen, she gets offered a librarian ship at the Nantucket Athenium. And I've never heard of an athenium. Have you heard of an athenium? I don't even know if they still exist. I've never heard of it. My spell check knows what they are, so I think it must be a thing. But it was this cultural center slash learning center slash library hybrid thing that they had going on at least in n Tuckett. It seems really cool, and so she shakes this job I think maybe closes her school. I don't know. I hopefully someone else took it on. And so she now starts working at the Atheneum. When five years later, when she's twenty three, there's this twenty three year old who had just escaped slavery a couple of years earlier who shows up to give his very first public address at anti slavery conference at the Nantucket Antheneum. And the guy's name is Frederick Douglas. And so he gives his very first public address about the need for abolition and all that ship at this thing, and everyone gets really excited about him because he's fucking awesome. Can you imagine here, like like I know he was known as an orator, Like can you imagine being in the crowd, probably like being like, oh yeah, I was there for Nirvana's Unplugged totally, totally because this is the very first one, and the stuff I was reading about it was like he was really nervous. He was like, I don't know if these people are gonna like me. And then like everyone's just like, he like steals the show. He's just like an opening speaker or whatever, and everyone's just just like, no, this guy, this guy rules. And so she's she stays friends with him, and they reign friends the rest of their lives. And I know this is not actually synchronicity or it's probably coincidence, but he called his newspaper the north Star, and I just anything that's astronomical, I'm going to shove into this story. And it's like shameless, yeah for you, Yeah, y'all hired a science fiction writer to tell a history podcast. I'm not gonna lie, but I'm going to look for anything I can't that fits. I wouldn't want you to be any other way, Margaret. And so this is something that I actually am trying to learn more about right now. And I don't totally know how I feel, because I I've known for a long time that the suffragette movement and a lot of early feminism and in the US and UK was racists, and there was a lot of like, we want the vote for white women and we don't give a shit about anyone else. But when I'm looking through the nineteenth century abolitionists, I keep coming across all of these places where they intertwined with early feminism, and and Maria Mitchell is one of these people, and it is part of the abolitionist movement, and it seems like there must have been like a a bad split, or maybe I'm just like spoiled and only reading the people who I come across, you know, I don't know, Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things where I see this a lot where people who are historically like marginalized, there's this idea that we need to be working against one another, and the times where you work alongside each other, it's like you really see so clearly that we're strong, our movements are stronger together, that unity is so much more powerful than division, like the times where there's that, you know, alignment. I think in history has always been so powerful. Yeah, no, totally, and it's when she gets done, you know. Like so she was part of this movement, this abolitionist movement called the free product produce movement, which was a slave labor boycott movement that was originally started shocker by Quakers. Um, and I think both white and black Quakers, but even when I'm talking about abolitionists, it's annoyingly hard to find information about the Black Quakers. The free Produce movement starts in the late eighteenth century, and by the early eighteen hundreds, various organizations of free black people are involved, and they opened stores that sold only slave labor free goods, including sugar and fabric. Maria Mitchell famously wore mostly silk because she wouldn't wear cotton grown by enslaved people, which sounds like the boogist way to protest slavery. Yeah, you're protesting slavery. And also like looking look like like drippy, Yeah, good look um. And so they had to set up their whole alternate um distribution networks for goods, and they did, and this movement ran in one form or another until the eighteen fifties into to the decade before the Civil War. And overall it was not actually a success. It was a valiant effort that a lot of people put a lot of work into, but like a lot of boycott movements, it did end up failing. And um, basically it was too hard for the these goods to compete on the open market. Some of them were less high quality, some of them were just too expensive. Not everyone can afford to roll around in silk, I don't know, and actually just to not The Quakers get a lot of credit, but she, actually, Maria Mitchell converted to Unitarian, so they also get to claim her, I think, And she was not afraid of mixing science and religion. One of her quotes about her astronomical work is every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God. And this is going to be a theme that's going to come through as the religious beliefs of all these people who are supposed to be like cold heart atheists working on science. I love that because, like how many I love when someone has like a scientist or like a math background, but they're also into astrology or something like that. Like I love you know, I love the I love the duality. Yeah, well, that's almost everyone I'm going to talk about, which wasn't even my plan. I just was like writing about all these people and then I was like, all these people are really interesting, and you know what else is really interesting is the complications of being anti capit lists who are supported by advertising. Abert you did not, so we have decided um you also, um, Bridget, if you have any ideas for sponsors, like very wholesome sponsors. One of my favorite sponsors of the show is the concept of potatoes. I'm also really excited about tap water, like potable water for free and on demand. UM. I've also would like our new sponsor, Sophie, would you be able to get um don't say anything to cops as a sponsor. Yeah concept UM. Shout out to that person who sent us that they got an actual water sponsor Twitter. I really appreciate you, Bridget. Do you have a wholesome sponsor that you would like you you would like us to re sponsored by? Uh? Yeah, I think you should be sponsored by a good Comb. You know, I really appreciate in respect of good Comb me all right, but not a specific brand, just the concept, yeah, just the concept of a reliable come all right, here's some other ads that may may or may not be as cool as that. All right, and we are back. So. One of the other things that Maria Mitchell did actually that I found interesting is that when she was a teenager, her older sister bought a piano and Maria pitched in. And this was this massive local scandal because Quakers at the time didn't approve of music, and her father at first was like really disapproving. But basically, when as far as as far as I can tell, when the rest of the community was like, you need to be mad at your daughter's for having a piano, he was like, I will not be mad at my daughter's And it ended up again, there's so many little micro moments that I would absolutely watch movies of. It ended up being this thing where like the local Quaker community came around and started incorporating music more into the stuff they do. Oh, this sounds like a like an old school version of Um, what's the movie where dancing is illegal? And then at the ends, like the quicker version of foot Loose? Yeah, exactly, Um, maybe that's where this foot Loose got it from. UM. In eighty seven, she discovers a telescopic comment that is one that can't be seen by the naked eye because she's doing astronomy this whole time while she's doing everything else. And she wins this Astronomy award, which is a gold medal from the King of Denmark, whose father had said anyone who discovers a comment gets a gold medal, and she was the first American to win the award and the first woman to win any astronomy award. So uh, and some some places will say it's the first telescopic comment, but I don't think that's true. But regardless, she became one of America's first like science celebrities, or one of America's early science celebrities, and she became a household name for a while, and she stayed working at the Atheneum. She also got computer work for nautical almanacs, which she did for nineteen years. And she was the first woman computer in the US, which is it's kind of impressive that being the first woman computer in the US was like the least impressive thing that she did in all of the things that I'm talking about about her, because that would have been enough, you know, like we would be talking about her if that was what she had done. She became a professor of astronomy at Vassar College in upstate New York. And the reason that rules from my point of view is that she did not have a degree. But she started teaching as a professor at college, and she immediately started turning it around in at least in her classes. She abolished grades, she didn't track absences, she dropped her class sizes, She refused to enforce social norms on her female students, Like female students were supposed to go out at night, and she would like hold classes at night because they're supposed to look at the fucking stars, you know. Yeah, how else would you study astronomy if not at night? And I don't know, maybe like you're supposed to be escorted by a man or something, you know, but not alone because that would also be scandal. And so she was such a popular teacher that Vassar College was attracting more astronomy students than Harvard. And she took the first real photos of the fucking sun, like in order to track sun spots. She brought all kinds of prestige to the college. Two men named a crater on the moon after her, and eventually she realized this is gonna shock you. Nothing like this has ever happened again. She was getting less money. She was getting less than half as much money as the men her male colleagues. I'm shocked. I know, I was scandalous. She was getting eight hundred dollars a year, plus room and board for herself and her father, and that's about two dollars today. Her male colleagues were getting plus room and boards, really making a lot more than she was. Yeah, yeah, like twice as much, more than twice as much, and am twice as much. And she's like the biggest draw at this fucking college. So and it's this long drawn out fight where her in one of another woman professor have to like file appeal after appeal, and then they had to pass three entire provisions in order to get like like that's how fucked up their system was that it took three different provisions to get it fixed. But she actually got guaranteed equal pay for women at Vassar College in the eighteen seventies, which is the Equal Pay Act wasn't signed until nineteen sixty three, and of course it's now sixty years after that, and women overall earned eighty three cents on the white male dollar. Black women earned sixty four cents on the white male dollar, and Hispanic women, which is the name the term used by this study. I'm exciting, earned fifty seven cents on the white male dollar, so ahead of her time, ahead of her time. And also I have to just shout out that like she it sounds like she wasn't just interested in getting equal pay for herself, but for other women who came after her, so really like lifting as she climbed, making sure that she had a legacy. That wasn't just It would be so easy to say, well, I got my equal pay because I'm the superstar professor here and I'm not really worried about women coming behind me. But she didn't do that totally. And she also she stays involved in feminist politics. She founds the American Association for the Advancement of Women, serves as as president for two years. And then the weirder part of what she did, at least from my point of view, she corresponded a bunch with the Moby Dick guy um and provide information about Nintucket for his book. And he has he has a name. It's a term in Melville but we all know his real name is Moby Dick guy. Um, and then call me moby Dick. Sorry, okay, it's fine. Well no, wait, wait and see if I can do my favorite joke about this off top of my head. So there's a fab assigned female at birth, a mab assigned male at birth, a cab all cops are bastards, and a hab from Hell's heart. I stab at the thank you. Yeah pretty good. Yeah, I definitely did not make that Radios five Stars and Apple podcast. So okay. So she's friends with moby Dick guy and then in her thirties, she's traveling around Italy in a bunch of Europe doing all this astronomical word and she does this thing where she's strong arms her way into like the popes of the thing where you look at the stars. I didn't write down this word in my observatory. She's trying to get into the Pope's observatory and they're like, well, you're a woman, you can't come in here. And he she gets like special dispensation from the Pope to go into the like no women allowed observatory. But the guy she's bumming around with around Italy is the Scarlet letter guy who also has another name, which is Nathaniel Hawthorne, and they probably weren't fucking I know that's what you were thinking. She described the Scarlet letter guy as not handsome, but he looks as the author of his work should look a little strange and odd, as if not point of the earth out because all of his books and short stories are like kind of creepy and weird. So I it's like, oh, yeah, he looks at the kind of guy who would write creepy, weird short stories as he does. Yeah, he's a fucking edge lord. I'm gonna get to them in that moment um. So she's actually probably either gay or a sexual. And it's really hard to figure that out about women, especially in the nineteenth century, um whereas the Scarlet letter guy was absolutely gay for Moby Dick Guy and vice versa. Melville once wrote about his bud Nathan Already, I feel that Hawthorne has dropped Germanist seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down the more I contemplate him, and further and further shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my southern soul. The strong New England roots. This is the only time I'm going to say I hope they didn't funk about a gay couple, because the fucking Hawthorne is a racist, little fucking edge lord. All of his friends are Northern abolitionists. But he was like, no, we can't risk breaking up the Union over slavery, whereas fucking Melville wrote a whole last book about how shitty slavery was ten years before the Civil War and then wrote this like book of poems about how great all of the people who went and fucking killed the Confederates are, And so Melville was, I hope they broke up over that, is what I'm trying to say. Oh my god, can you imagine like the annoying ask conversations where Hawthorne's just like, I'm just asking questions, I'm just playing Devil's advocate or are you getting so upset? He is absolutely that guy. That is him. I feel like I dated a guy like that before. I'm sorry me too. So anyway back to Maria. Two years before she died, she finally got her degree, which was when Columbia University gave her an honorary doctorate, And I like this especially because this is my plan. I don't have a college degree. I just want someone to fucking hand me one for being cool. That is my long term plan. Anyway, that's that's Maria Mitchell, America's first female computer, and I think she fucking ruled. But while we're talking about words for how we describe people, it turns out the words scientist was coined by a man, William why Hill, to describe a specific woman, Mary Somerville, to quote historian Maria Popova, The commonly used term up to that point man of science clearly couldn't apply to a woman, nor to what way will considered the peculiar illumination of the female mind, the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn't call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist. She had written with deep knowledge of all of these disciplines and more way well unified them all into scientists. Wow, I I this is so fascinating, And I guess I have a question for the both of you if that's okay, Like you know, time and time again, I'll hear something where it's like, actually, this was first coin to talk about a woman, or the first computer was a woman. So this it blows my mind at the first that the term scientists was coined to have a you know, gender neutral way to talk about a woman who practiced science. But why do you think this history goes over looks? Like why is that not common knowledge even to people who are interested in this kind of thing. So if you want to go first, I mean, because the patriarchy has had too much power for far too long and it's depressing. But I feel like we're finally fighting back on it enough where we're learning about things that we should have known a long time ago. And it's also that there's so many different ways to communicate now, and so people that might have been afraid to have spoken up face to face are able to speak up on what they believe in a safer environment. M. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm gonna go with that one. Wait now I had another. I had another one too, though. Um So I think that one of the things that happens is that when you know, I get asked like why does it matter if this person in history was gay? Or like why does it matter that this person who invented this thing or that thing was a woman or something. Can it just be about the knowledge? And so because because identity matters, basically, but people don't want to pretend like identity matters, and so that's a way to kind of keep us invisible. If like, any time a woman does something, you're like, humanity did this thing. And and that's also what people say when Aman does something. But but if you don't draw attention to the fact that someone who has been silenced and shut up and had to overcome systemic barriers because of you know, race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever, I don't know. That's that's my take. Yeah, I think that's so true. And I think of all the ways that different people have spent further people who are already marginalized are like further marginalized by the way that we tell their stories or don't tell their stories. Like I'm a huge fan of the painter Freed to Carlo. I didn't know she had a disability until like recently, because we don't think of, you know, her story as being like a story of disability justice. Right, Like all the different ways that like these pieces of our identity, that things that make us who we are and inform our experiences and all of that. We are just unseen, and if we're unseen, it takes away our power. I think it's I think the work that you're doing to like retell these stories and like make them gay, make them queer, make them who they were, I think is so important and powerful. I think we're also a like world of headlines. We read the headline, we don't actually read the article. We don't actually read the article. People read the the snazzy headline. I think that was the same since the beginning of time. You don't actually do the work to find out the information. And and like, I feel like shows like this where we're going and you're learning all these things are so vital to our story as as as people. Yeah, And it's like and the people who are writing those headlines are going to come at it with their biases. Whereas you know, when I write short, when I do a very quick version of someone's story, I'm absolutely going to be like, and he loved fucking dudes, you know, because it's not going to get included and the other versions of the story, even though that makes no sense, It makes no sense to disclude that. And I mean you know. I mean it guess depends what you're talking about, like maybe not like if I'm talking about someone who, like, I don't know, runs a gay bar, like maybe like maybe that's implicit, you know that maybe instead of like and he was a sexual I don't know. Anyway, writing us back into history it's important and so so after Maria Mitchell, it wasn't too long before computing became women's work. And actually a lot of the early computers I think came from her students, basically because she was teaching so many women astronomy. And that's something else that also gets left out is that you know, you have this like individual genius who discovers ideas, whereas teaching isn't as important. And and that's actually something that come up a lot, comes up a lot in terms of I think women in particular breaking through boundaries is that we like teach each other and we we take people along with us, like what you were talking about earlier about like not I got mine, fuck you? You know, So computing becomes women's work, and eventually black women's work in particular first and foremost, because you can get away with paying women less than men. Harvard observatory starting in eighteen seventy seven, was excited to maximize their budget. There's there's so many numbers they have to crunch, and they could pay women cents to fifty cents an hour, or roughly seven to fourteen dollars an hour in today's wages. So for decades, these people who are doing all of the important, like crazy complicated math, we're getting paid seven dollars an hour. Uh, to quote that writer Maria Popova again. Decades before they were allowed to vote. In a century before NASA's unheralded women mathematicians helped put the first man on the moon. These women, who came to be known as the quote Harvard computers illuminated the composition of stars and classified hundreds of thousands of stars according to a system they invented, which astronomers continue to use today. Their calculations became the basis for the discovery that the universe is expanding. So that's what they're So I'm like, oh, they're just crunching numbers and discovering that the universe is expanding, and you know, learning how to classify stars. Yeah, not actual like stuff that would involve you know, analytical thinking or totally the secretarial work really yea. And so this goes on for decades, and I actually didn't find in a quick search. I wasn't able to find the end date of when Harvard's computers came to an end, but it ran up until at least seven was the one person I specifically tracked her employment at that and I think it probably lasted until the era of the electronic computer. But I prefer to think that they're still there, hopefully better paid doing astronomical math by hand, just like some weird caball of people hanging out at Harvard, I don't know. So, so women started working as computers because they were cheaper to hire than During World War Two, computing and programming were cemented as women's work because all the boys were off at war. So then some women's supervisors come in, like Macy Roberts, who oversaw California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the nineteen forties, which is later part of NASA and designed the first artificial satellite that the US ever put in space. And she hired only women because she thought it made for a more cohesive team and teamwork focused group and the way that they would code. Women can apply to this job into job applications because they couldn't say, hey, women can apply to so they would say no degree necessary, Oh, I like that. And so this attitude of hiring women spread, and soon women were calculating everything from the lift for World War two bombers to rocket paths. And of course, as cool as looking at the stars is, it's even cooler to figure how to reach them and reach out and touch them, which brings us to Dorothy Vaughn. But before we talk about Dorothy Vaughn, we need to talk about never talked to cops. The sponsor of this show. The sponsor of the show is shut the funk up. It doesn't do you any good. Ever, you'd always think it's going to do you good, but it doesn't. It does not. Yeah, as well as potatoes, I really like potatoes. I'm gonna keep hitting good, good, comb and water. I'd like to throw out songs that are nostalgic in a good way. Yes, that is what we are as a concept. Yes, as well as these other things. And we are back and we're talking about Dorothy Vaughn was black woman who was born in nineteen ten in Missouri. But then moved at age seven to West Virginia, kicked ass in school, kicked ass in college at Wilberforce University, historically black university, and then decided not to go to grad school but instead of teach math in high school because the Great Depression hit and her family really needed the money, especially if her sister was going to get to go to college too. In one President Roosevelt desegregated the defense industry, which like sort of he sort of desegregated it. He like, I think on a federal level he disegregated it, but didn't get disegregated at a state level. But it allowed black people to start working on the war effort at home. So so NAKA, the precursor of NASA, went about hiring black women in their quest to make airplanes because they were trying to ramp up the US's production from three thousand airplanes a year to fifty thousand airplanes a year with the slogan victory through air power, and Vaughan left teaching and started doing sky math and space math instead, even though she'd never flown on an airplane, which fucking rules doesn't rule that she never got to flying. The play I'm sure she did eventually, but fucking rules that she did Space Math and she's one of the She's one of the characters in the Hidden Figures, the book and then the movie that is really cool and people should see. I think it's um Octavia Spencer is her plays her character Ma from the movie Mam You've ever seen that? I haven't. No. I liked all the actors in that movie so much. I have, but exactly what you're talking. Octavia is a phenomenal actress. She's so good, she's she's fantastic. I personally think she should be cast in every movie, just every movie. I think, yeah, maybe every character. We got a Ma reference on. This is amazing. You know, I saw my opening night in the theater drunk and it was one of the best nights of my life. Ted out of ten. I love that for you. I love that. I have no idea. I have no idea what you're talking about. I live under a rock, imbarrass I just don't know about ship. You could ask me low brush just gonna go over my head to this. There was a low brow one last one we recorded that. It's so funny working with with Margaret and Robert Evans. They don't know, they don't know anything. It's great, it's rushing. It makes me feel better and also feel worse at the same time. So anyways, before we were all making fun of me. Now I'm just kidding. Alright. So, so after the war, a lot of the white women went back home, but most of the black women stayed for a lot of reasons, one of which I believe was that they were basically earning about four times as much as they would if even though they were getting paid way less than the men, they were still getting paid way more than they were as black school teachers, and you know, especially in racially segregated schools. I believe Duchess Hair is the granddaughter of one of the black computers at NASA, and she wrote a book called Hidden Human Computers, which came out around the same time as Shadowley's book Hidden Figures, which is the one that became a movie. But they I was like really confused because there's two books with basically the same name, But they actually were working on the books around the same time, and they cover sort of different topics, and they ended up kind of teaming up on like going to NASA to do some of their like tours and stuff together. So it actually became a really cool story about the two books as compared to how it first appears. When you realize that there's two books that came at the same time with the same name. That's my long tangent about the two books. So Duchess Harris, when she's interviewed about the Black computers and and race relations, she says, this is not a story of healing race relations. The government was desperate for help. These black women were hired as a last resort when they ran out of white women. The government wanted to win the war and later to put an American in space after the Russians launched spot Nick in ninety seven. So a lot of the like feel good stuff, you know. Yeah, I mean the movie Hidden Figures, it really makes it. I don't know if you all have seen it, but it really goes out of its way to suggest that, like this was about feel good equality. Like there's a scene where, um, the white man who's running their lab, I want to say, it's a it's a famous dude. Yeah, he's portrayed by Kevin Costner. Costner, Yeah, yeah, like he like thought but the women are having to like walk very far away to go to the bathroom because it's a segregated bathroom, and he dramatically like, Harrison is the name of the character, thank you? Yeah. Uh. He dramatically like takes the whites only sign off of the bathroom to be like, no, we can use any bathroom you want. And I think I like the movie and I like this sort of like warm, fuzzy equality stuff, but it does obscure the reality that you Margaret just said that, like they were trying to win. This was you know, I think it really goes back to this idea of like, you know, nationalism can be kind of an oppressed system that doesn't really see you when it's not really interested in your inequality or like seeing you as an individual or a person. And so, you know, against that backdrop, it was like, yeah, it was we wanted to win. We wanted to you know, further our nationalist agenda, and these people were useful to us, and so we quote cared about them insofar as they were useful. Their labor was useful. Uh yeah, these systems don't see us. Yeah. Uh. When I found out what actually happened with the the segregation signs and the people who actually did that work. I'm gonna get to that in a moment. Okay. Oh no, yeah, no, I like I knew some of it before I watched the movie. I watched the movie as part of preparing the script, and I read some articles about it before about some of the stuff it gets right and wrong. But um, I don't know. I still really like the movie, but with especially that scene. Okay. So a lot of Dorothy Vaughan's career gets talked about in Hidden Figures, which focuses on three black women who got the first uss not into space, and it a lot of it's true, although it skims over Vaughan's own math genius. It mostly talks about her as like a supervisor. Right, but she helped write the manuals and set the standards for all of the computers at NAKA, and she worked in the West Area Computing Unit, which was a segregated black unit. When her white supervisor died in ninety nine, she became acting supervisor, and it took two years for that to be made official and for her to get the raise that should have come along with the increase of responsibility. And she was naka's first black supervisor and one of one of the only women supervisors, but as a supervisor, she intervened to fight for promotions and pay raises for all women computers, both both black and white. And when NACA became NASA Night, it desegregated the West End Computing Unit and integrated the rest of NASA, and she then joined a race and gender diverse division working on electronic computing. She taught herself the programming language for TROUN and then taught it to all her co workers. She fucking ruled UM and West Area computers ran from eight They got paid an awful lot less than the men. The The article I read implied that they were paid the same as white women. I don't know, but women in general were getting paid a salary, a starting salary, but the equivalent of twenty three thousand dollars a year in today's money, whereas men were getting a starting salary at forty dollars a year, which, like Jesus, not only that disparity, but also like damn, even the men are getting fucking ripped off. Yeah, everyone's getting exploited here. It's like I know that they're working, they're not working eight hour days and then going home. You know, but they make about four times as much the black women working, and NASA are making about four times as much as they would be elsewhere, which doesn't make the fucking pay balance not fucked up. It really just shows how fucked up everything is, you know, all the way down. So Hidden Figures is all about the segregated bathrooms. That's one of the main points of tension in the story. And Kevin Costner comes and I'm sorry, I'm reading this all my script, even we just talked about it. But I don't know how to skim fast enough. So he gets out of crowb already ripped down the colored women's restroom sign and he announces, in the worst line in the entire movie, we all pe the same color here at NASA. I forgot about that. It is bad, not good, I know. And the thing is, there was someone ripping down segregation signs during the Naka years when the place was segregated, a black woman who worked as a computer named Miriam Mann. She was actually the grandmother of this the woman I was saying who wrote this book. So Miriam Man is all of four ft eleven, so her friends call her Big Mama, and there's separate tables at the back of the dining hall that are marked with a sign that say colored computers. And Miriam didn't like that. So finally one day she stole the sign put it in her purse. The next day they put the sign back, so she stole let it a kid, And so she just did this over and over and over again before they just stopped putting the sign back. I don't know. And so the fact that that, particularly because it's already kind of bad that it's a white savior move, to have Kevin Costner come to it, it's an extra little dig that it was a black woman who did it. Yeah, I mean what, like, I I know all the like I bet I can imagine some Hollywood studio somewhere being like, we have to make Kevin Costner, we have to give him this like dramatic moment to have him be the like savior, the ally YadA YadA YadA. I get it. But like, imagine if they depicted a truth a more truthful version of that scene and had it be Big Mama who did it, Like I don't know, like what would be the I don't know, I just I know how Hollywood thinks, But it would have been that much more authentic and powerful to have a black woman be the person who who did that, because also like it would honor the fact that doing that took a lot of risk and a lot of like gumph and hutzpah. You know, like it's sort of races that that fact, Like having a white the white guy who's running ship do it, it's not as cool as having the black woman with everything to lose do it. But that's what happened, Like the like the reality is more badass than the Hollywood version, totally, yeah, because he's taking no risk and exactly. Yeah, And apparently her husband was like, honey, probably shouldn't do that. You're gonna get fired and we need this job, you know. Um, And she was like, I can't fucking know. I'm taking this fucking sign. You know. It's this thing that like seems like a little petty thing like had it's mischief. I stole the side, you know, but it wasn't she like really put herself out there to do it. Yeah, So another West Virginia raised black girl who did math there. Well, she was a woman, but I wrote it in the script about she's a girl because she was raised in anyway, Katherine Johnson, who did a lot of the math, who put the first people into space, who's also in this movie. And I'm not actually from West Virginia, but I live here now, so I have to do this whole thing where I'm like contractually obliged to get excited about anything that's to do with West Virginia. So that's why I'm pointing this out. And her county didn't even offer public school for black kids past eighth grade, so her entire fucking family knew how smart she was and how important school was for her. So they moved two hours away so that they could go to school elsewhere, and they spent like basically, and then summers they would come back home to where the rest of their extended family live, I believe. But she was smartest, fucking her parents weren't gonna see that go to waste. So she graduated high school, which she was fucking fourteen, because I she was smart at fuck. She went to West Virginia State University, which is another HBU, historically black university. She graduates at eighteen from fucking college, and then for grad school, She's one of three black students who went off to West Virginia University, a white school, to be the first students to integrate it. In nineteen fifty two, she got hired by NAKA as a computer and soon she was assigned to the all male, all white flight research team, where she was quickly and aggressive. Basically, she showed up and and actually did kind of act like she does in the movie where she pretty aggressively proves herself and I'm not going to take any ship, and she ends up being like the First Woman and her planning meetings just by saying like, no, I need to go into this fucking meeting. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepherd's May five flight, the first time a US astronaut went into space, the first US astronaut to actually or with the Earth. John Glenn had his trajectory calculated by a computer like an IBM, not a person, and so he insisted that Katherine Johnson double check all the numbers, like specifically asked for her by name, which is kind of interesting to me because he was a hell of sexist, which I'll get to later. Um. And then she goes on to help Apollo eleven get to the moon. As she described her time after NACA became NASA and segregation ended. We needed to be assertive as women in those days, assertive and aggressive, and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA, women were not allowed to put their names on the reports. No woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with at Skapinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston. But Henry Pearson, our supervisor, he was not a fan of women, kept pushing him to finish the report when we that we were working on. Finally Ted told him Katherine should finish the report. She's done most of the work anyway, So Ted left Pearson with no choice. I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something. I don't know. She fucking ruled. She lived to be a hundred and one. She lived long enough to see herself as a major character in a major film, which I can't even imagine what that would. Yes, Oh, we have that like, you know, the saying like give people their flowers while they can still smell them. I've seen pictures of her like getting celebrated while she was alive, which I love and fun fact, I have a picture of her on my water bottle here, see that, a little car, a little cartoon, a sticker of her. That's cool. No, I mean like it's like that, Like people should google pictures of her later in her life. Getting to meet I think it was Taraji p Henson who portrayed her, and like getting to meet Obama, Like, I'm happy that she was on this earth while she got to really see people celebrate her legacy. It really is an important thing. Yeah, yeah, cool people who did cool stuff. The last person I'm going to talk really briefly about today is the opposite of a cool person. Oh good. Chief architect of US's lunar mission was a fucking Nazi. Oh no, like in a had been a member of the Nazi Party since Verner von Bione was the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, but before that he lived in Germany. In ninety seven, he joined the Nazi Party. Later, when he defected to the US, he claimed he joined in nineteen thirty nine, but he was lying. I think he wanted to look a little bit less zealous of a fascist, but he really was. Probably he's like the ultimate bad version of the I don't care as long as I get to do science guy, which kind of underpins the whole thing about how science is often divorced from politics and sometimes that's sort of cool and sometimes it's really really not cool. So he's a Nazi rocket scientist who joined the s S and used slave labor to build his rockets. Like literally he would walk down the halls of concentration camps and pick out prisoners he wanted to enslave to make his war machines. And then he became one of six hundred scientists and engineers and ship that the U S grabbed from Germany and what gets called Operation paper Clip, as they were looking for an advantage in the Cold War against Russia. But to be clear, just to both sides of the ship, the USSR was no better. They recruited folks of their own from the Nazi scientists, just fighting over the spoils of war. And I feel like the like the understanding of what you're talking about, how like like the US government is like, we don't give a ship, We just want to win this fucking war. It goes both ways in a really a grim way. So that's where I want to break it today. With all the women computers who did all the wildest calculations in history, How are you feeling about these people? Well? I I like that so many of them were, like you said, doing cool ship, even if it was for like not like nations that couldn't really it's it's almost like I wish that they were living at a time where they could do this ship for institutions or organizations that could really see them like you know, yeah, but I I this is very much like these are These are my heroes, These are my idols. These are the people that like allowed me to see myself in technology and computing and all of that. Um, yeah, I love them. Yeah. Is there anything I missed about them that you want to like shout out or talk about, Like, uh no, I think you really did a great job. But only the only thing I love, the only little thing that I love is when I was researching this for another project, I learned that the word kill a girl. Did you come across that in your that like computing was so associated with like women and secretarial work that the phrase kill a girl kind of like kill a lot was that meant roughly the computing power of one girl working for one hour, and so they used to describe it as like, oh, kill a girl, like that's the computing power of one girl working for one hour. So fun fact, that's amazing. Cool. Well, when we come back on Wednesday, we're going to talk about gay computer scientists, Soviet space cults, astronauts, cosmonauts, weird people, a whole bunch of people, cool people that did cool stuff, perhaps mostly amazing. Bridget, you have any plugables for us? Yeah, this has been great. Um, please check out my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet on this very network. You can follow me on Twitter at Bridget Mariana on Instagram at Bridget Marie in d C. I want you to know it's very hard for me to not write a terrible joke that you've heard a thousand times about the title of your podcast into my introduction to you about what it's just gonna be, something like you say there's no girls on the Internet, but here we are or whatever. I don't know. I really the world is better served that I took it out of the script, but you added at the end of goodness, you know, they say there's no girls on the internet, but here's three of them talking about technology and computer so you tell me, yeah, there it is, and we'll be back on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.