Alice Dragoon writes:

Had Virginia Tower Norwood listened to her high school guidance counselor, she would have become a librarian. Her aptitude test showed a remarkable facility with numbers, and in 1943, he could think of no better way for a young woman to put such skills to use. Luckily, Norwood didn’t suffer from the same lack of imagination. The salutatorian of her Philadelphia high school class, she had long been devouring logic puzzles and putting the slide rule her father had given her at age nine to good use. Norwood ignored her counselor’s advice and applied to MIT.

She would go on to become a pioneering inventor in the new field of microwave antenna design. She designed the transmitter for a reconnaissance mission to the moon that cleared the way for the Apollo landings. And she conceived and led the development of the first multispectral scanner to image Earth from space—the first in a series of satellite-based scanners that have been continuously imaging the world for nearly half a century.

Looking back, she says, she never really considered a career in library science: “I can’t spell.”

MIT held classes year-round during World War II, so Norwood arrived in Cambridge in the summer of 1944, shortly after her high school graduation. The alumnus who’d interviewed her admitted he’d never interviewed a woman before (and told her she was less frumpy than the MIT women he’d known), but she wasn’t deterred when she found herself one of only around a dozen women in her class. MIT then had no dorms for women, so she rented a room in a Central Square apartment, walking to campus on nice days or taking the Mass. Ave. streetcar for a nickel in bad weather. Women were allowed to dine in the dormitory dining halls only as guests of male students; she often subsisted on toast and sliced tomatoes. [Continue reading…]