HAMPTON, Va. — I visited the Hampton History Museum to learn more about a mechanical calculator used at NASA Langley.
"We have an artifact that is really nondescript gray, about the size of a microwave and it weighs about 40 pounds", says Allen Hoilman, curator of the Hampton History Museum. "Row after row of numbers and buttons and such complicated gears inside you couldn't imagine."
This is a Friden mechanical calculating machine used at the NASA Langley Research Center.
Hoilman says, "Women primarily at NASA, which we have come to know as the human computers, were mathematicians who had this wonderful skill about processing numbers and formulas."
This was the tool of choice for the human computers that you may have heard of from the movie Hidden Figures.
"They would take the formulas and they would sit down with their mathematical minds, and this mechanical calculator and run all of those numbers to come up with the results of the experiment for the engineers," says Hoilman.
The wind tunnel experiments and calculations performed at NASA Langley played a key role in getting spacecraft in and out of Earth’s atmosphere. Hoilman says, "This was the height of the of the space race. So these women often worked in the Mercury program, the Gemini program, right up through the Apollo program."
The Hampton History Museum is located in downtown Hampton, just off of Settlers Landing Road. The museum is open Monday to Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
