Whereas taking a highway journey, searching for that scorching new restaurant or searching for your new workplace constructing, what device has turn out to be useful greater than a International Positioning System (GPS)? Perhaps a automotive, however that is inappropriate. Having a GPS on our telephones makes getting round extra environment friendly. And whereas we could not give our GPS a second thought as soon as we have reached our vacation spot, there’s a fascinating story behind it.
The distinguished hidden determine, Dr. Gladys West, was a real pioneer who pushed previous racial boundaries and contributed to the invention of the GPS. With out her curious spirit and quest for data, she could by no means have ended up the place she wanted to be.
It All Started With a Dream
Born in 1930 in Sutherland, Virginia, West spent a lot of her childhood — when not in class — harvesting crops on her household farm. In her memoir, It Started With A Dream, she remembers strolling the three miles to the segregated, one-room schoolhouse “with rusty, decrepit furnishings, generally leaky ceilings and at all times hand-me-down books.”
Difficult Racial Boundaries
There weren’t many alternatives for younger Black ladies in her group that did not contain farming or working at a tobacco plant. However West needed and knew she was destined for extra. She overcame racial boundaries in science and math.
“Every single day, I needed and dreamed of getting extra — extra books, extra school rooms, extra academics and extra time to dream and picture what life can be like if solely I might fly away from the strenuous and seemingly unending work on our household farm,” she mentioned in her memoir.
It would not be lengthy earlier than that dream got here true.
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Dr. Gladys West Early Life
West labored and studied laborious, graduating as valedictorian from her highschool. Her excessive educational efficiency earned her a scholarship to the HBCU Virginia State Faculty — which is now Virginia State College. It was there that West earned each her bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in arithmetic, ending up in 1955.
Discovering Alternative within the Navy
Earlier than returning for her grasp’s, West labored as a math trainer. In between incomes her levels, she tried discovering a job with the federal government; nevertheless, she was unsuccessful because of racial segregation and sexism. In 1956, West was lastly supplied a job with the U.S. Navy.
Throughout her lengthy and profitable profession, West returned to high school and earned a second grasp’s diploma in public administration from The College of Oklahoma in 1973. After retiring in 1998 from her job with the U.S. Navy on the age of 68, West attended the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) and earned a Ph.D. in public administration and coverage affairs at 70 years outdated.
Excelling Above the Relaxation
In her memoir, West recounts how whereas incomes her Ph.D. at VPI, she assumed her fellow counterparts — a lot of them highly-educated white males — can be smarter than her. They’d gone to raised colleges and have been afforded higher alternatives. Nonetheless, she discovered she might maintain her personal and sometimes carried out higher than her friends.
“I discovered I used to be fairly good, particularly in comparison with a few of my classmates who did not know as a lot as I did. A few of them failed assessments and got the exams over so they might keep within the Ph.D. program,” she mentioned in her memoir.
A Good Pupil
West additionally defined how learning at an HBCU taught her greater than the topic data. “Those that didn’t get their work completed due to an absence of effort have been despatched house. No make-up assessments, no breaks, no ifs, ands or buts as a result of they have been getting ready us for the tough world of discrimination and prejudice that lie forward of us,” mentioned West in her memoir.
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Breaking Feminine Boundaries
When West joined the U.S. Navy in 1956 as a mathematician for the U.S. Naval Proving Floor — a weapons lab in Virginia. She was one in every of 4 Black workers, together with Ira V. West, a fellow mathematician, and future husband. Collectively, she and Ira finally had three kids.
Noteworthy Feminine Mathematician
Whereas working for the U.S. Naval Proving Floor, West solved complicated math equations by hand, although she finally programmed computer systems to calculate equations for her. One in every of her first main initiatives included the Naval Ordnance Analysis Calculator (NORC) — a program that helped observe the actions of Pluto in relation to Neptune. After 100 hours of laptop programming and 5 billion calculations, the undertaking acquired a advantage award.
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Inventing the GPS
From there, she turned the undertaking supervisor for SEASAT, an experimental surveillance satellite tv for pc that operated for 99 days, orbiting Earth. It was designed to gather information on parts of the ocean, together with wave heights, icebergs and temperatures. It was the primary program to show satellites might acquire helpful ocean information.
Geosat
West and her colleagues might then type GEOSAT — a satellite tv for pc program that created laptop fashions of the planet’s floor. By means of this, satellite tv for pc actions may very well be precisely calculated, and a mannequin of Earth shaped — often known as a geoid. These fashions are what helped make the GPS an correct device.
In December 2018, Dr. Gladys West was inducted into the Air Power Area and Missile Pioneers Corridor of Fame, proving her exceptional affect on science and the Air Power area program.
