When programing your navigation system for a trip (land, sea, or air) thank Dr. Gladys Mae Brown West, for her development of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
By Johnnie Grant
Gladys Mae Brown was born in rural Sutherland Virginia, where her parents owned a small farm in an area populated mostly by sharecroppers. Growing up, when not in school, she spent much of her time helping to harvest crops on the family farm, an occupation she knew many of her peers would continue into adulthood. In her community the only clear options for a young Black girl’s future were continuing to farm or working at a tobacco-processing plant. But at school Gladys’s exceptional talent for learning offered another path. As valedictorian of her high-school graduating class, Gladys received a full scholarship to Virginia State College (now Virginia State University), the historically Black college where she earned a degree in mathematics in 1952. Gladys later returned for a master’s degree in mathematics, graduating in 1955. after spending time teaching math in racially segregated Virginia schools and after applying for a series of jobs in Virginia’s segregated state government that were instead awarded to white men.
In 1956 Gladys was hired as a mathematician by the U.S. Naval Proving Ground, a weapons laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia, as only their fourth Black employee.
At Dahlgren, Gladys West was admired for her ability to solve complex mathematical equations by hand. She eventually transitioned from solving those equations herself to programming computers to do it for her.
One of her first major projects was work on the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator (NORC), an award-winning program designed (via 100 hours of computer calculations, which often had to be double-checked for errors by hand, which she did, to determine the movements of Pluto in relation to Neptune.
In 1978 Dr. Gladys West was named project manager of Seasat, an experimental U.S. ocean surveillance satellite designed to provide data on a wide array of oceanographic conditions and features, including wave height, water temperature, currents, winds, icebergs, and coastal characteristics. It was the first project to demonstrate that satellites could be used to observe useful oceanographic data
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Out of West’s work on Seasat came GEOSAT, a satellite programmed to create computer models of the Earth’s surface. By teaching a computer to account for gravity, tides, and other forces that act on Earth’s surface, West and her team created a program that could precisely calculate the orbits of satellites. These calculations made it possible to determine a model for the exact shape of Earth, called a geoid. It is this model, and later updates, that allows the GPS system to make accurate calculations of any place on Earth.
Dr. Gladys West’s vital contributions to GPS technology were recognized when a member of her sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha read a short biography West had submitted for an alumni function.
During her career, Dr. West encountered many hardships because of racism against African Americans. A prime example was the lack of recognition she received while working, and not being granted projects that included travel and exposure.
