As a child, Johnson has said in interviews, she loved to count. Her father placed a premium on education and insisted all four of his children go to college, working overtime to pay for it. Johnson says this atmosphere was crucial to her success. "I was always around people who were learning something. I liked to learn."
Johnson graduated high school at 14 and college at 18. Her high school principal sowed the first seeds for her career in space — he would walk her home after school pointing out the constellations overhead. At college, a family friend from her home town who knew her talent for math ordered her to enroll in her class.
Later, she was mentored by Dr. William W. Schiefflin Claytor, who suggested she aim to become a research mathematician. He created the classes he knew she would need to succeed, including one in which she was the only student. Throughout her education, she says she succeeded in part because she was always asking questions — even when people tried to ignore her, her hand stayed up.
After graduating, Johnson became a math teacher, then married and had children. She returned to teaching when her husband got sick. He died a few years later of cancer and in 1959 she married the gentleman she scolds in the trailer for asking "They let women handle that sort of thing?" (In real life they were introduced by her minister, not co-workers armed with pie.) But back to the science.
Source: The Visionary Project
Johnson was hired in 1953 to work for NASA — then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), since there was no space program at the time — at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. Langley was a hub of airplane research and the predecessor of Houston's Johnson Space Center.
At the time, the agency hired human computers to do the math that powered the more prestigious engineers' work. Johnson worked mainly by hand, filling large tables of numbers with complex calculations. Her first assignment was to process the black box data from crashed planes. "You had a mission and you worked on it. And it was important to you to do your job," she said in a 2011 interview. "And play bridge at lunch."
Source: WHROTV interview
Her move to working on rockets came from her endless curiosity and talent. She'd been pulled in to work with an all-male flight research team on a temporary basis. She was so good they chose not to send her back.
"When the space program came along I just happened to be working with guys and then they had briefings on it," she said in the 2011 interview. "I asked permission to go. And they said 'well, the girls don't usually go.' I said 'well, is there a law?'" She was allowed into the meetings.
Sources: WHROTV interview, NASA
Johnson had had some experience with calculating machines before she joined NACA, so she was better prepared to exploit the technology as the agency incorporated it. NACA was hesitant to rely on electronic calculators, particularly for the type of life-and-death calculations that built the space program. So Johnson shined both for her talents in picking up new techniques and for her accuracy in manually checking the computers before they were trusted.
NACA and the rest of the defense industry had been forced to hire African Americans by executive order during World War II, and there were black and white female mathematicians working as separate groups at the agency. Johnson says her team was better. "[The male engineers] preferred the black mathematicians, they said we were better than the white girls. For one thing, all of us had been to college," she said, whereas only some of the white women had.
Sources: Visionary Project interview, WHROTV interview
And while the female computers weren't given the same respect as male engineers, that never fazed Johnson. "Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men," she said in a 2011 interview. "Men don't pay attention to small things. They aren't interested in how you do it, just [in] give me the answer."
Sources: Visionary Project interview, WHROTV interview
Johnson worked closely with Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, both extraordinary scientists in their own right. (They are played in the movie by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.)
Dorothy Vaughan was a mathematician and the head for almost a decade of the West Area Computing Unit, the team of black female human computers. Later, she became a FORTRAN programmer.
Source: The Human Computer Project
Mary Jackson specialized in the wind tunnel experiments run on the airplane side of NASA's work. She eventually held a position in the Office of Equal Opportunity.
In 1961, on the strength of Johnson's work, Alan Shepherd became the first American to go into space. Johnson calculated his trajectory, the path he would take from launch to landing. If she was wrong, the best case scenario was that NASA wouldn't have known where to pick him up.
Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start," Johnson said in an interview. "I said, 'Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.' That was my forte.
By the time the Mercury mission was in the works to make John Glenn the first man to orbit Earth, NASA had begun incorporating electronic calculators, but everyone was still suspicious of the new technology. Glenn insisted Johnson check the computer's math. "'If she says the computer's right, I'll take it,'" Johnson says he told the agency. (Other reports give his line as the hard-to-stomach "Get the girl to check the numbers.")
Johnson also lent her numerical genius to the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing mission. "Everybody was concerned about them getting there," Johnson said in a 2010 interview. "We were concerned about them getting back."
There were an incredible number of factors at play: Earth's rotation, the moon's location, when you took off, when you reached the moon. "It was intricate but it was possible," she said. The mission went according to plan.
Her numbers weren't just there to make sure everything went right — she also stepped in when something went wrong. In 1970, Apollo 13, which had been bound for the moon, was stymied by the explosions of two oxygen tanks. Johnson was one of the mathematicians who scrambled to calculate a safe path back to Earth for the stranded astronauts. That work became the basis of a system that only requires one star observation matched with an onboard star chart for astronauts to pinpoint their location.
Johnson retired in 1986, but her huge contribution to the space program has only been reaching the public spotlight for the past few years. Part of that is, as she is the first to admit, science is a collaborative endeavor. "I never took any credit because we always worked as a team, it was never just one person," she said in a 2010 interview.
Last year, President Obama gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the most prestigious honor available to civilians.
Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book "Hidden Figures," had an interesting path to Johnson's story. She grew up near the Langley facility in Hampton, Virginia — a spot chosen because the agency wanted a rural location in easy reach of Washington, DC. When the facility was built, it was just an overnight steamer ride away from the capital.
Source: speech
As a child, Shetterly visited her father's office at NASA, where he was a researcher. "There were always so many women. There were lots of women, a diverse group of women — women of all colors, women of all ages. Some of the women there were my grandmother's age. But it never occurred to me to question why they were there," Shetterly told an audience at Langley in 2014. "It wasn't until many years later that I left Hampton and left Langley and realized that that wasn't the way the world worked." When she was back in town visiting her parents, her father began pointing out women who had been mathematicians at Langley. That became the seed of the book and the movie.
Source: speech
Pharrell Williams, who wrote the score for the Hidden Figures movie, also grew up in Hampton and has worked on STEM outreach programs with the agency before.
Source: NASA
Earlier this year, NASA dedicated a new data center on Langley's campus to Johnson. (The cast of the movie filmed a video to congratulate her.) She was also given a Silver Snoopy award by astronaut Leland Melvin, which recognizes "outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success." That trophy will join, among many others that Johnson has received, an American flag that flew to the moon.
Sources: NASA
Johnson's time as a teacher hasn't ever really ended. She strongly believes people need to learn how to learn. "I teach you what the problem is, how to attack it — if you attack it properly you'll get the answer," she said in a 2011 interview.
Source: interview
And she is still an enthusiastic supporter of the space program. "I'm very proud of what they're doing and how they're doing it and why," she said. "[People ask] 'What good does it do us to go to space?' Well what good does it do you to stay home?"
Source: interview
Here's the trailer for "Hidden Figures," the movie that dramatizes Johnson's life and this often forgotten chapter in NASA's history.
Margot Lee Shetterly's book "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race" will be published September 6.
The movie "Hidden Figures," starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, will be released January 13.