The Unsung at the Edge of History: Stories from the Sidelines

You know, some evenings I sit out here and watch the satellites crawl across the sky. Little pinpricks of light. And you think, my goodness, what does it take to get a thing like that all the way up yonder? Ey up, Earl. It takes a right smart bit of something, I'll tell you that for nowt. A big firework and a lot of clever clogs doing their sums. It does. And last week, we talked about folks who did the hard part but didn't get their name in the paper, like Claudette Colvin. Well, friend, I got another one for you. A story that starts with the whole country lookin' up at the sky and seein'...

nothin'. Oh? Go on then, love. I've got my brew. I'm all ears. Alright. So it's 1957. The Russians have just sent up that little beepin' ball, Sputnik. And America is in a flat-out panic. We're supposed to be leading the world, and we can't even get a machine into orbit. Ooh, I remember the fuss about that! Yes. Everyone thought the sky was about to fall in. That's it exactly. Now, we had this fella, a German rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun. Famous as they come. He had a rocket, the Jupiter-C. A good one. But it was like a fishin' line that was just a few feet too short to reach the deep water.

His team could get it ninety-three percent of the way to orbit. But ninety-three percent is the same as zero. So close, but no cigar, as you Yanks say. They were stuck. Stuck solid. They couldn't change the engine—no time for that. They needed more push from the same machine. It's like needing a locomotive to pull ten more cars, but you can't make the boiler any bigger. The problem goes to this one division, Rocketdyne. Nine hundred engineers. And one... ONE woman. There's always one, isn't there? The one who has to get it all sorted. Her name was Mary Sherman Morgan.

And Bridget, I tell you what, her story is something else. She grew up on a farm in North Dakota, so poor she didn't even go to school 'til she was nine. Nine? Bless her heart. And she ended up with nine hundred engineers? How on earth did she manage that? She just had the gift. She wanted to be a chemist. Left college without a degree, but during the war she got a job makin' explosives. Turns out, she was real good at figuring out what makes things go boom. So good that Rocketdyne hired her and made her a Theoretical Performance Specialist. A what-now?

Sounds very grand. It means she was the one who did the math on the fuel. While all those fellas were building the big metal parts, her job was to figure out the juice that made it go. And now, the whole country's reputation is sitting on her desk. The bosses come to her and say, "Mary, we need a brand-new fuel. Something with more power than alcohol, but it can't melt Herr von Braun's engine." Good heavens. No pressure then, love. Just invent summat that's never existed before, and do it before teatime. That's about the size of it. She's working with these hydrazine compounds—nasty, toxic stuff that wants to explode if you look at it sideways.

And she's the only one doing it. She's got no team. Just her, her brain, and her calculations. The quietest person in the room, doing the most important job. I've seen that in my time. They're the ones you've got to watch. So... did she do it? After months of work, she comes up with a new recipe. A blend of two chemicals. They called it Hydyne. And when they tested it... it gave them the extra twelve percent of power they needed. It was the missing piece. The thing that got the line out into the deep water. Ooh! She did it! The lass from the farm with no degree!

Oh, that's brilliant, that is! On January thirty-first, 1958, they put her fuel in that Jupiter-C rocket, stuck a satellite called Explorer 1 on top, and lit the fuse. And it went all the way. America was finally in space. And I bet Wernher von Braun was all over the telly, smiling and taking the credit. Like he'd invented gravity. And Mary Sherman Morgan? Her name was nowhere. Her work was classified. Buried. She was a quiet person, you know, didn't seek the limelight. And in those days... well. A woman in that world was invisible. Mm-hmm. They take your work, but they don't take your picture.

A tale as old as time, that is. Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth. For decades, nobody knew. It wasn't until her own son, George, started digging around after she passed away. He found all these old papers, letters from colleagues praising her work on Hydyne. He's the one who put the story together and wrote a book about his mam. Called it "Rocket Girl." Aww, that's a lovely thing for a son to do. Making sure his mam got her due. So her story didn't get lost forever. He made sure of it. And it just goes to show you. Sometimes the biggest things...

the things that change the whole world... they don't come from the fella makin' all the noise at the front of the depot. They come from the quiet one in the back, the one just makin' sure the engine has the right fuel to make the grade. Well, here's to Mary Sherman Morgan. The Rocket Girl. Right then, Earl. That was a grand story. Night night, sleep tight, chuck. Night now, Bridget. Well. That is about the size of it.