From Hidden Heroes:
As a young African American girl living on a farm during the Great Depression, Gladys West discovered she had a gift for math. Forty years later, she mapped the shape of Earth and helped invent GPS.
The road to the one-room schoolhouse in Sutherland, Virginia, was three miles long, crossing railroad tracks and route 460, lined with honeysuckle and pines. An African American girl named Gladys Brown, the daughter of sharecroppers, walked the three miles to school each morning, often accompanied by a handful of friends. It was the late 1930s, but other than the occasional automobile passing the children on the highway, the world the girl lived in could have belonged to the 19th century. The small farmhouse where she lived had no indoor plumbing or electricity; when school was out, she would help her mother scrubbing clothes clean on a washboard, pressing them with an iron heated directly from a wood fire.
“I dreamed of one day living somewhere bigger, prettier, and different,” she would laterwrite, “but the dreams were vague because I had not been anywhere outside of Sutherland.”Even at an early age, Gladys West (née Brown) was a promising student and a hard worker, sensing that a solid education would be crucial if she wanted to ultimately explore a wider world beyond rural Virginia. She had an aptitude for math, though the resources for actually nurturing those skills were limited, given that the one teacher at the Butterwood Road School—for “colored” students only—had to simultaneously teach a class composed of students ranging from first to seventh grades. And so Gladys West began to nurture her talents on her own. “I counted fenceposts along the road and across the fields as we walked to school, just to have something different to do,” she later recalled. “I became good at it, never realizing that I was sharpening some skills and abilities that I would one day utilize to help calculate the hypothetical shape of the Earth.”
You might well have benefited from those calculations several times today, while you were following the directions of your car’s navigation system, or looking for the nearest Italian restaurant on your phone—or anything else that relies on our modern-day ability to determine our exact geographic location using computers and satellites. Eight-year-old Gladys West wouldn’t have been able to even imagine such a thing, counting fenceposts on her way to the Butterwood Road school, but the path she was on would eventually lead to the creation of one of the modern world’s true miracles: the Global Positioning System, commonly known as GPS.....
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