Construction of the West Area began in earnest in 1939. Now, as Dorothy and the other passengers in the shuttle bus came to the end of the forested back road that connected the two sides of the campus, the view opened onto a bizarre landscape consisting of finished two-story brick buildings and cleared construction sites with half-complete structures reaching up out of what was still mostly a thicket of woods and fields. Towering behind one building was a gigantic three-story-high ribbed-metal pipe, like a caterpillar loosed from the mind of H. G. Wells. This racetrack of air called the Sixteen-foot High-Speed Tunnel was completed just two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and formed a closed rectangular circuit that stretched three hundred feet wide and one hundred feet deep. Adding to the futuristic aspect of the landscape was the fact that all the buildings on the West Side—indeed, all the laboratory’s buildings and everything on the air base as well—had been painted dark green in 1942 to camouflage them against a possible attack by Axis forces.
The shuttle bus made the West Side rounds, stopping to deposit Dorothy at the front door of an outpost called the Warehouse Building. There was nothing to distinguish the building or its offices from any of the other unremarkable spaces on the laboratory’s register: same narrow windows with a view of the fevered construction taking place outside, same office-bright ceiling lights, same government-issue desks arranged classroom style. Even before she walked through the door that would be her workaday home for the duration, she could hear the music of the calculating machines inside the room: a click every time its minder hit a key to enter a number, a drumbeat in response to an operations key, a full drumroll as the machine ran through a complex calculation; the cumulative effect sounded like the practice room of a military band’s percussion unit. The arrangement played in all the rooms where women were engaged in aeronautical research at its most granular level, from the central computing pool over on the East Side to the smaller groups of computers attached to specific wind tunnels or engineering groups. The only difference between the other rooms at Langley and the one that Dorothy walked into was that the women sitting at the desks, plying the machines for answers to the question what makes things fly, were black.
The white women from the State Teachers College across from Dorothy’s house in Farmville, and their sisters from schools like Sweetbriar and Hollins and the New Jersey College for Women, performed together in the East Area computing pool. In the West Area computing office where Dorothy was beginning work, the members of the calculating machine symphony hailed from the Virginia State College for Negroes, and Arkansas AM&N, and Hampton Institute. This room, set up to accommodate about twenty workers, was nearly full. Miriam Mann, Pearl Bassette, Yvette Brown, Thelma Stiles, and Minnie McGraw filled the first five seats at the end of May. Over the following six months, more graduates of Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women training class joined the group, as well as women from farther afield, like Lessie Hunter, a graduate of Prairie View University in Texas. Many, like Dorothy, brought years of teaching experience to the position.
Dorothy took a seat as the women greeted her over the din of the calculating machines; she knew without needing to ask that they were all part of the same confederation of black colleges, alumni associations, civic organizations, and churches. Many of them belonged to Greek letter organizations like Delta Sigma Theta or Alpha Kappa Alpha, which Dorothy had joined at Wilberforce. By securing jobs in Langley’s West Computing section, they now had pledged one of the world’s most exclusive sororities. In 1940, just 2 percent of all black women earned college degrees, and 60 percent of those women became teachers, mostly in public elementary and high schools. Exactly zero percent of those 1940 college graduates became engineers. And yet, in an era when just 10 percent of white women and not even a full third of white men had earned college degrees, the West Computers had found jobs and each other at the “single best and biggest aeronautical research complex in the world.”
At the front of the room, like teachers in a classroom, sat two former East Area Computers: Margery Hannah, West Computing’s section head, and her assistant, Blanche Sponsler. Tall and lanky, with enormous eyes and even bigger glasses, Margery Hannah started working at the lab in 1939 after graduating from Idaho State University, not long after the East Area Computing pool outgrew the office it shared with Pearl Young. Young, hired in 1922, and for the better part of two decades the laboratory’s only female engineer, now served as the laboratory’s technical editor (the “English critic,” as she was usually called) and managed a small, mostly female staff responsible for setting the standards for the NACA’s research reports. Virginia Tucker, who had ascended to the position of head computer, ran Langley’s entire computing operation of over two hundred women, and supervised Margery Hannah and the other section heads. The work that came to a particular section usually flowed down from the top of the pyramid: engineers came to Virginia Tucker with computing assignments; she parceled out the tasks to her section heads, who then divided up the work among the girls in their sections. Over time, engineers might bring their computing directly to the section head, or even to a particular girl whose work they liked.
With labor shortages affecting the laboratory’s ability to execute time-sensitive drag cleanup and other tests designed to make military aircraft as powerful, safe, and efficient as possible, the West Computers added much-needed minds to the agency’s escalating research effort. The NACA planned to double the size of Langley’s West Area in the next three years. Mother Langley had even given birth to two new laboratories: the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, in 1939, and the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940. Both laboratories siphoned off Langley employees, including computers, for their startup staffs. The agency scrambled to keep up with the production miracle that was the American aircraft industry, which had gone from the country’s forty-third largest industry in 1938 to the world’s number one by 1943.
For most of its existence a small and contained operation, the NACA’s flagship laboratory was now a many-layered bureaucracy flush with new faces. As engineering groups grew in number and complexity, an employee’s daily routine was pegged less to the revolutions of the laboratory as a whole and more to the ebb and flow of their individual work groups. Employees sat elbow to elbow with the same people during their morning coffee, ate lunch in their designated time slot in the cafeteria as a group, and left together to catch the evening shuttle bus. Air Scoop published everything from recaps of presentations by aeronautical notables to the scores from the intramural softball league and the dance schedule for the Noble Order of the Green Cow, the club for the laboratory’s fashionable white social set. The weekly dispatch kept employees abreast of the constant activity and fostered morale, but in a breathless year in which the laboratory staff would come close to doubling, it wasn’t easy for the employees themselves to absorb the full impact of the organization’s unusual mission or the unusual assemblage of people carrying it out.
But just one month before Dorothy’s trip from Farmville, Air Scoop covered Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox’s one-day junket to the laboratory. Fifteen hundred employees filed into the Structures Research Laboratory, a cavernous facility located across a dusty clearing from the Warehouse Building, to hear Knox’s address. He congratulated the NACA for leading all federal agencies in employee purchases of war bonds—larger versions of the war stamps on sale at the Moton school—and lauded them for the research that turned an unreliable prototype of a dive bomber into the “slow but deadly” SBD Dauntless, a decisive force in the navy’s June 1942 victory at the Battle of Midway.