"Baby Peggy" was a big film star in the early days of Hollywood. But her parents and business managers squandered her fortune and she ended up a store clerk trying to live down her past. Dwight has the story, which actually is rather inspiring.
He also has the obituary for NASA'a Katherine Johnson. They made a film about her not very long ago.
5 comments:
Hidden Figures was an excellent film. People don't realize we went to the moon based on calculations done manually, and on hand crank calculators and slide rules. Yes there were "Main frames" but they weren't trusted because the programming was "buggy". …. and they were expensive to operate.
Ted, my father, before being called up by the USAF, worked an 8" Howitzer for the Louisiana National Guard. One of the interesting visits they had was by one of the 'calculators' who worked on the ranging tables for the gun system. She was very knowledgeable and was able to answer everyone's questions as to how the tables were derived.
The Pentagon had whole rooms full of calculators working on calculating all sorts of things. Which is one of the reasons we won WWII. All those calculators, usually female, who calculated away.
Now we have women who protest lack of women in STEM fields, while they (the women who are protesting) are in social justice fields. Sad.
Paper, slide rules, log charts and all the other things we used to have to use to figure things out. Now all in our phones. Crazy world.
Ted, we liked that film.
Beans, the first electronic computers were created to either calculate ballistics or to break codes. Both of those grew out of rooms of "calculators".
Two sad stories. Peggy's life was, in microcosm, typical for Hollywierd from the beginning... Massive riches frittered away... Mrs. Johnson's on the other hand was a story of triumph over segregation and minimization of women in the workforce.
There were 10,000 people calculating for NASA.
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