Pearl Young
“Believe in yourself, set your goals, and viciously prioritize to achieve them. You are your only limit.”
Was anyone else convinced they would work for NASA when they grew up but then quickly discovered their hatred for math and science? No, just me? Ok.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded in 1958 after President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act to compete against Soviet advances in space exploration. While many believe NASA to be the first national space program, 43 years before NASA, the NACA was founded.
The NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was founded in 1915 to coordinate space research happening across the entire nation. It quickly turned into the leading research organization in space development until NASA was formed in 1958 and NACA was developed into the new administration.
Pearl Young was the first female hired by the NACA and the second female physicist hired to work for the federal government. She graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1919 with physics, chemistry, and mathematics majors. She was hired by the NACA in 1922 as a physicist in the Langley Memorial Research Center and Laboratory in Virginia. She began her career with the NACA in the Instrument Research Division, where she designed and constructed all instrumentation used to collect scientific information on our solar system.
Young’s most notable achievement from working at the NACA was her implementation of a new technical writing system that is still used by engineers at NASA today. After reading the poorly written procedures by inexperienced engineers, she realized that a technical system would be necessary for the laboratory to publish higher-quality publications. She was appointed the first Chief Technical Editor of the Langley Research Center in 1926. In this position, she established a new office and a new system to approve the technical documents being published from Langley. The system requires all documents to be extensively reviewed by a panel of peers and an editorial staff before the authors make revisions. While other engineers and their clients originally fought against Young’s system in favor of prompt answers, Young successfully argued that the quality of the final product was more important than the speed at which it was produced. In 1943, she published the “Style Manual for Engineering Authors,” which became the guide for authors at Langley and many other NACA research centers, and it continues to be referenced by engineers today.
