Johnson's Life
Explanation:
As a very young girl, she loved to count things. She counted everything, from the number of steps she took to get to the road to the number of forks and plates she washed when doing the dishes.
Johnson was born with a love for mathematics. At a young age, she was very eager to go to school. Johnson vividly remembered watching her older siblings go to school, wishing so much that she could go with them. When Johnson finally did start school, she so excelled that by age 10, she was in high school. By age 15, she’d started college!
At age 18, Johnson graduated with very high grades and degrees in mathematics and French.
At that time, the only professional job available to Johnson after graduation was teaching. She taught school for a number of years but stopped when she married and had children. In 1952, she started teaching again to support her family after her husband became ill.
How did she get to NASA
When Johnson was 34 years old, she applied for a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA. NACA was the name of the government agency that later became NASA. In the early to mid-1950s, NACA was just beginning its work on studying space. The NACA was hiring women—including African Americans—to be "computers." These female computers calculated the mathematics for the engineers who were working on the space program. The first time Johnson applied, all of the jobs were already filled. She was disappointed, but she didn’t give up. Johnson applied the following year, and that time the agency offered her a job. She took it and worked with a large group of women who were all computers like herself.
