Before the Women of Hidden Figures
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently been working on a book for 8 to 12 year olds about an incident in WWII. Non-fiction books for kids inevitably include one of my favorite things: sidebars.* Sidebars are a chance to explore an issue that enriches and expands the central text. They also are often a chance for me to learn something new. I did not, however, expect to learn something new about the role of women in World War II, a subject I’ve spent a lot of time on in recent years. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a reference to something I’d never heard of: women calculating the trajectories of missiles for the army. I did a quick literature search to verify that it was true, added a sentence about it to my side bar, and set the question aside for later investigation. The time for later investigation has come.
Changes in military technology made it possible to fire an artillery shell or drop a bomb from an airplane with greater accuracy than ever before, but that accuracy wasn’t the result of seat of the pants decisions made by soldiers in the field. Accuracy required someone to create complex firing tables that provided soldiers with the correct trajectories, drop points, elevation angles and muzzle velocities. Those tables were location specific. They had to take into account temperature, air density, wind, and target positions. In the days when “computer” referred to a person rather than a machine, those tables were calculated largely by hand.**
When the United States entered the war in 1941, the army needed more computers and needed them quickly. Instead of pulling computers from the limited pool of able-bodied men, they recruited young women with a gift for mathematics, many of them straight out of high-school. They were the heart of the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where they became experts in the science of ballistics calculation.
Six of those women—Betty Jean Jennings, Kathleen McNulty,*** Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Snyder,*** Ruth Lichterman and Marilyn Wescoff—were selected to be part of the group that produced ENIAC, the first electronic computer. Male engineers designed the machine and turned the question of programing it over to the female computers. Their first program was designed to compute a shell trajectory.
The women’s role in the success of ENIAC was discounted almost immediately. Their part in the project was literally left out of the picture: the first public photo of the project, which appeared in the New York Times, was a wide shot that included both men and women working on the machine. When the photograph was reprinted, the women were cropped out. Grrr.
* I first met sidebars in my third-grade social studies text. I remember it clearly: it was nerdy love at first sight.
**They also used a 30-foot-long mechanical calculating machine called a Bush differential analyzer, shown in the picture above.
***Also shown in the picture above/
How Did the Axis Powers Get Their Name?
I recently struggled to explain the Allies and the Axis Powers in War II in a sidebar for a book aimed at 8 to 12 year olds.* It was harder than you might think. Even just listing who belonged in each group was tricky, because in some ways World War II was a collection of smaller wars mashed together into one big war. Who was on what side when changed. (The Soviet Union being the most astonishing example of this.) I think I succeeded. I hope my editor agrees.
In the process, I stumbled across the answer to a question I’ve had for a long time: why do we call German, Italy and Japan the Axis powers?** (This may not be news to anyone but me.)
In October, 1936, Germany and Italy signed the first of several treaties that would create the alliance between the three powers. On November 1, Benito Mussolini declared that from now on, Europe would revolve around the axis between Rome and Berlin.
And for at least a while it was true.
* One of the challenges of writing history for the general intelligent audience (that would be you, right?) is that occasionally you are required to explain something very complicated in very few words. Why uranium is radioactive, for example.
** A related question from an earlier blog post: How did Germany become the Hun?
Chasing Chopin
I am a Chopin fan. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Paris in the 1830s. I even wrote about the heroine of the Polish Revolution of 1830 in Women Warriors.* Those subjects (and so many more) come together in one delightful package in Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
Chasing Chopin opens in a jazz club in Chicago where LaFarge heard a quartet riffing on the funeral march from Chopin’s Opus 35 Sonata.** She had a decades-long relationship with the sonata and was fascinated by its transformation into a jazz vernacular. A quick Google search revealed not only that musicians have been appropriating the funeral march for more than a hundred years, but that Chopin is the subject of video games, a popular manga series, and a Netflix animated series based on the same.*** Intrigued, LaFarge set out to understand the work, the world from which it came, and the power it continues to have.
The result is a charming and deeply personal account of both her subject and her search. LaFarge literally follows Chopin’s footsteps for the three years in which Chopin wrote his sonata, between 1837 and 1840, visiting the sites in Majorca and Paris where he lived and worked. In the process, she looks at the larger world in which he functioned, including a close look at his relationship with the gender-bending author George Sand. She places him firmly in the context of literal revolutions in Poland and France and the artistic revolution of European Romanticism. She explores the difference between the modern piano and the pianos of Chopin’s time. She looks at Chopin’s role as a revered Polish hero and as a broader cultural icon.
Chasing Chopin is part biography, part memoir, part musical appreciation, and one hundred percent fascinating.
So fascinating that it inspired me to pull out all my Chopin recordings looking for the Opus 35 Sonata, which I apparently don’t own. So I listened to all the others instead. For the record, Chopin is good music to write to.
*Emilia Plater. Just in case you’re curious.
**Whether you realize it or not, you know the opening phrase of Chopin’s funeral march. Its dum dum da dum is the sound of something bad about to happen on screen, whether in a Loony Tunes episode or a movie thriller.
***Forest of Piano. Just in case you’re curious. I found it delightful.
The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.