Day - 25 - Valerie Thomas - She Helped Us See Earth from Space

Valerie Thomas

Another space scientist! It took me a while to be able to write this one because I didn't have enough science under my belt.

Valerie Thomas was born in 1943 in Maryland. She was a born scientist. She was fascinated by all things science. Unfortunately, she was born into a world where girls were not supposed to do science. I mean, we had other pursuits that fit us better.

She did not let the lack of support stop her. At the age of eight, she went off to the public library.

An aside - FUND PUBLIC LIBRARIES! For some kids, it is the only place they will find a window into a wider world!

Valerie checked out The Boy's First Book of Electronics. She loved it. Her father noticed her love of electronics, but he was just as uninterested in helping her out like everybody else. Nobody encouraged her to pursue her love of science!

Luckily this did not deter her. She found ways outside of school to indulge in her passion.

(Libraries. (cough, cough. Fund libraries!) Aren't you glad her local public librarian wasn't as close-minded as the rest of the people in her world?

She went to an all-girl high school! They were as uninterested in helping Valerie as everyone else in her life, and they did not offer much in the way of encouragement for her scientific heart.

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Despite this constant beat of telling her that science wasn't for girls or girls like her, anyway, she did what all determined women do. She ignored them.

When she got to Morgan State University, she threw caution to the wind and enrolled in the physics program. She was only one of two women studying physics. I can only assume that she was tickled to have found some other girl who put her fingers in her ears and said, "la, la, la!" when people were telling her that science was only for boys!

Well, anyone who has seen the movie Hidden Figures knows what happened next. She was hired to work at NASA. She was brought in as a computer.

The black women who were hired early in NASA's existence had to have all sorts of wicked math skills. Valerie Thomas most certainly did.

I could spend pages and pages trying to explain what and how she did what she did.

If you want to get into how in the 1970s she became the international expert and go-to source for pretty much everyone in the world for information on how to interpret and use Landsat technology - this is the system of satellites that takes pictures of the earth. She was also instrumental in developing the LACIE program - Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment. - Click here and read the fascinating interview she did about both of these things. The point of LACIE was to measure wheat yields across the globe.

And I'll bet you thought NASA was only concerned with outer space.

Before she retired in 1995, she had been -

- Project manager of the Space Physics Analysis Network
- Associate Chief of the Space Science Data office
- Manager of the NASA Automated System Incident Response Capability
- Chair of the Space Science Data Operations office Education Committee
- Helped to develop the computer designs that supported research on Halley's Comet, studying the Ozone Layer, satellite technology, the Voyager program, and studying a supernova.

What did she invent?

She invented the Illusion Transmitter...obviously.

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"What is that?" you ask.

1980 - Illusion Transmitter for transmitting 3D optical illusions developed

Valerie Thomas

The “Illusion Transmitter” is basically a device that would simulate a real-time, 3-dimensional viewing of an object through optical illusions with parabolic mirrors.

What did this do?

Well, it allows NASA to look at everything from outer space objects to a section of the globe as if that thing is right in front of them. They can look at it from all sides in great detail. It would be like getting a big slice of Mars as if you could reach out and touch it.

It sends images from space to earth.

NASA uses this technology to this day. It is also used in televisions and has been adapted for hospitals.

Post NASA, Valerie has been busy.

She earned:

The GSFC - Goddard Space Flight Center Medal of Merit
NASA Equal Opportunity Medal - For her work with getting women and minorities in the sciences

She works with:

satellite

The National Technical Association - NTA
Science Mathematics Aerospace Research Institute
Shades of Blue - is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to mentoring, tutoring, counseling, and arranging internship and employment referrals for young people who desire to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers.like

I am happy to share Valerie Thomas with you.

She made it possible for us to speak to our satellites and see the picture they sent back to us!

Day 17 - Lonnie G. Johnson - Not Just A Super Soaker

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You might have heard that one of the best selling toys of all time was made by a black man. I'm talking about the Super Soaker.


My son had one of these things when he was little. He and my daughter used to invite hoards of kids to our house and they would have water fights. Water balloons, super soakers, the hose, and the Slip n' Slide.

They had a big time.

When I was looking for African American inventors, I didn't even bother with the "Father of the Super Soaker".

His story sounded like a David and Goliath type of tale.

He invented the Super Soaker, Hasbro didn't give him credit for it -  by which I mean that didn't want to pay him - he sued them, won, and got a huge payday.

How many African American inventors had to go through this? Lots. As much fun as the Super Soaker is, I wasn't certain it merited an entire blog post.

Then, I learned about Lonnie Johnson.

All I could think as I read through his biography is - You've got to be kidding me! This is the guy who created the Super Soaker? This guy? How come we only know about the Super Soaker?

I don't even know where to begin!

He was born in Mobile, Al on October 6th (that's my birthday too) in 1949. His father, a WWII vet who became a handyman after the war, noticed that Lonnie liked to tinker with things. So, at a young age, his father explained how electricity worked.

The kids in Lonnie's neighborhood called him "The Professor" because he was always tinkering and inventing things.

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He made a go-kart with a working engine when he was a kid. He created it out of scrap metal. They had to push it to get it going, but once it was going, it could sustain itself. Eventually, the police made them stop using it. Apparently, when children create a motorized vehicle it isn't likely to come up to basic road standards.

He continued to tinker the entire time he was growing up. He even made his own toys.

He attended segregated Williamson High School in Alabama. He actually graduated in the last segregated class.

He was fascinated by robots he saw on television. He had no idea they were just suits with actors in them. So, he decided to build one for himself. It took him a year, and at the end of his senior year, his school entered Lonnie's creation, Linex, into the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) Science Fair held at the University of Alabama in 1968.

Incidentally, this is the same university where George Wallace attempted to prevent the first two black students who were enrolled there from entering about five years earlier.

Linux and Lonnie

Lonnie's high school was the only black school that entered the competition. Linex, Lonnie's robot, won first prize. The people who were judging the competition were not from the university.

The university officials didn't seem too happy about Lonnie's win. He recalls that nobody from the university said anything to him aside from "Good-bye" and "Ya'll drive safe."

They were not interested in the senior who had built his own working robot. Well, who would be? I mean, that wasn't such an incredible thing for an eighteen-year-old to do in 1968.

Anyway, he ended up at Tuskeegee where he achieved advanced degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering.



What he discovered once he got out into the working world was that Tuskeegee had prepared him better to be an engineer than some of the white engineers he encountered who'd gotten educations at some of the most prestigious schools in the country.

I would like to editorialize here: I suspect that this was not because the other schools lacked solid education. Lonnie G. Johnson is freaking brilliant. That might have had something to do with it.

I know, you're thinking, "So, after all of that he made the Super Soaker, and that is his claim to fame after all of that fancy education?"

Well, I suppose so, but on the way there he also:

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- Helped develop systems for the stealth bomber for the military

Galileo Spacecraft

- In 1979 he was the systems engineer for Galileo - You know, for NASA









- Then, in the 1980s while working on some other projects, he accidentally created the basis for the Super Soaker. He sold it to a company that Hasbro acquired.

- In 1991 The Super Soaker made over 200 million dollars.

- He holds over one hundred patents

He made a mint after Hasbro paid up. He left industry and opened his own company.

Johnson Research and Development.

He started working on something he calls the Johnson Thermo Electric Energy Converter. This thing would turn heat energy into electricity.

It has generated a ton of interest. If he gets this thing working it will revolutionize the green energy industry.

He's already made a huge mark on the world culturally, militarily, and astronomically...I suppose it is time to do it ecologically.

Lonnie G. Johnson - So much more than a Super Soaker!

Still, that thing is really cool. I'm just sayin'

In 2011, Johnson was inducted into the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame - The first black engineer ever to have been so honored.

Lonnie G. Johnson

Celebrate Black History!

Day 16 - Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. Is Out Of This World!

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I love outer space. I do. I love looking at pics on NASA's website. I was absolutely in love with the Mars Rover, and I am always geeked out when we discover something cool beyond the boundary of our atmosphere.

Pluto!

I do not pretend to know how any of it works, but I do love to read about it.

So, when I ran across Dr. George Edward Alcorn Jr. I was stoked. I was also flummoxed about much of what he did. Let me explain.

Dr. Alcorn was born in 1940. I could understand that part.

He was not only a brilliant man who graduated with honors from Occidental College in Los Angeles, but also lettered in both football and basketball.

So far so good.

Then, he got his PH.D. from Howard in atomic and molecular engineering in the early 1960s.

Okay, got it.

Mars Rover

He spent twelve years working for IBM and became an IBM Visiting Professor at Howard University teaching electrical engineering.

Okay. Not so hard to understand. Then, he went to work for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

This is when things get both interesting and completely difficult to explain. Let me start by saying that he holds twenty patents for inventing things.

Most of the things he invented...absolutely unintelligible to me. I can write them out and research them, and then they make sense, but in terms of explaining them to anyone, I would need a dictionary and more space here than I mean to spend on any one inventor though he really deserves it.

To that end, I will explain one of them as completely as I can, give a summary of what another is, and then, if you really want to do it, you can look up all of the other things he's invented.

In 1979 he started patenting things. The first ones had to do with semiconductors for IBM. 

What is a semiconductor?





In 1984, Dr. Alcorn patented a thing that changed the way we look at space....literally.

He filed a patent for the X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer. This thing allowed for the detection of radio signatures at a more distant and accurate rate than previously possible and influenced the continued evolution of imaging devices.

What does that mean?

x-ray Imaging 

"Used with space telescopes and other satellites, x-ray imaging spectrometers provide highly useful data for a wide range of scientific and technical applications. With improvements that addressed structural and performance deficiencies, Alcorn's devices and their descendants have been used to conduct planetary mapping, search for new planets, create star charts to reveal motions of systems, and examine deep space phenomena."

In other words, most of the coolest images we have of distant things in space, all of our information we have as we search for "earthlike planets", the mapping of Pluto, the Giant Earth discovery, and many of those other cool images are possible because of Dr. Alcorn. I have been a huge fan of his work for years, and I had no idea!

In 1999, Dr. Alcorn was awarded the Technology Leadership Award. One of two awards that can be awarded to NASA employees. That was the year he invented the Airborne topographical Mapping System.

In 2015 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Dr. George Edward Alcorn  Fr.

I give you George Edward Alcorn Jr.

A man who has got us closer to the stars!

Celebrate Black History!