How Gladys West Created And Navigated Systems That Built The GPS

"I knew deep in my heart that nothing was getting in my way." Dr Gladys Mae West has revolutionised technology and shaped the future and our present to what it is today. Without her efforts and discovery, we wouldn't have been able to use its multifaceted applications. 

Born and brought up on a small farm, Dr West wanted to make a name for herself, get an education and not harvest crops and work on her family farm. She said, "I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn’t going to be stuck there all my life." With zealous determination to make a change Dr West wanted to be a graduate but with limited financial resources and funds, her only option was to avail a rare scholarship. "I started doing everything so that I would be at the top," and "sure enough, when I graduated from high school, I got one." She received a scholarship to study at Virginia State University and took a part-time job to fund her other college expenses. 

Inspiring Story That Led To One Of Today's Greatest Creations

Dr West decided to major in Mathematics as she thought of it as a well-respected subject during that time. She took several teaching positions before getting offered the job in the naval base of Dahlgren, Virginia where she was only the second black woman to be hired and the fourth employee to work in the naval base. During all the stereotypes surrounding her even while the civil rights protests were developing especially under the ambit of racial segregation issues, Dr West knew that holding on to her career and job was her priority. 

She justified her opinions and said, "They hadn’t worked with us, they don’t know [black people] except to work in the homes and yards, and so you gotta show them who you are." She further added, "We tried to do our part by being a role model as a black person: be respectful, do your work and contribute while all this is going on." For Dr West, being a woman of colour during a very unsettling political period meant deconstructing the stereotypes around her race and gender. For her, her identity was through her education, career and academia. She knew the importance of education and used it as her shield. 

She was part of numerous projects but one of the most illustrious was "the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune," a study that garnered a lot of appreciation and attention towards her work by her superiors. It was after this study that Dr West was promoted and became the project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite that could monitor the oceans. Her dedication and creation of an IBM 7030 Stretch Computer was what later on helped build the global positioning system (GPS). 

For most of her life, her work has been sidelined and kept a secret, this was partly also because she worked for the military at the naval base. Even years after her work was successfully made public and for more than 40 years she has been a 'hidden figure' to our society. It was in 2018 that Dr West was inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame for her years of devotion and creation. “We always get pushed to the back because we are not usually the ones that are writing the book of the past. 

It was always them writing and they wrote about people they thought were acceptable. And now we’re getting a little bit more desire to pull up everyone else that’s made a difference," Dr West's view on why black men/women do not get enough recognition for their lifetime achievements. 

"I felt proud of myself as a woman, knowing that I can do what I can do. But as a black woman, that’s another level where you have to prove to a society that hasn’t accepted you for what you are. What I did was keep trying to prove that I was as good as you are, there is no difference in the work we can do." For Dr West, education has always been her biggest achievement along with her unwavering confidence.