Black women scientists created GPS, Caller ID and Call Waiting

Gladys West and Shirley Jackson

The 2024 Women’s History theme, a Celebration of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, recognizes women who understand the need to eliminate bias and discrimination from individuals’ lives and institutions. Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s contributions to history, culture and society and has been observed annually in the month of March in the United States since 1987. March is a month dedicated to reflect on the often-overlooked contributions of women to U.S. and world history.
During the month of March, the Democrat newspaper will reflect stories of women who are often overlooked for their contributions, and why it’s important to study them and their significant moments in history. From science and education to politics to arts and entertainment, it is a chance to reflect on the trailblazing women who lead the way for change.
This week’s focus will lift the amazing work of two Black women scientists whose contributions affect our lives everyday, throughout the day.
Dr. Gladys West gave the world GPS. When Dr. West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in December 2018, the organization hailed her as the hidden figure whose mathematical work lead to the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS). While at U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, she programmed an IBM 7030 “Stretch” computer that delivered refined calculations for an “extremely accurate geodetic Earth model, a geoid, optimized” for what would eventually become known as GPS.
Gladys Brown West was born October 27, 1930, Sutherland, Virginia, where her parents owned a small farm in an area populated mostly by sharecroppers. Growing up, when not in school, she spent much of her time helping to harvest crops on the family farm, an occupation she knew many of her peers would continue into adulthood. In her community the only clear options for a young Black girl’s future were continuing to farm or working at a tobacco-processing plant. But at school her talent for learning offered another path. As valedictorian of her high-school graduating class, Gladys received a full scholarship to Virginia State College (now Virginia State University), the historically Black college where she earned a degree in mathematics in 1952. She later returned for a master’s degree in the subject, graduating in 1955. In 1956, she began working at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory and helped produce a study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. There she met Ira V. West, another Black mathematician on the base; the couple married in 1957 and had three children.
During her career on the naval base, West earned another master’s degree in 1973, this time in public administration from the University of Oklahoma. Though she retired from the base in 1998 at age 68, she continued her education: after recovering from a stroke, she received a Ph.D. in public administration and policy affairs from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2000 at age 70.

Dr. Shirley Jackson gave the world Caller ID and Call Waiting. A theoretical physicist, Shirley Jackson was the first Black woman to graduate with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in any field (Her Ph.D. is in Theoretical Elementary Particle Physics) and also just the second African American woman to earn a doctorate in physics in U.S. history.During her tenure at what was formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories’ Theoretical Physics Research Department in the 1970s and 1980s, she has been credited as helping develop the technology that enabled Caller ID and Call Waiting.
Shirley Ann Jackson, born August 5, 1946, Washington, D.C., is American scientist and educator and the first Black woman to receive a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jackson helped develop technologies that made communication faster and easier and was an advocate for minority representation in academia, particularly in STEM disciplines. In high school she enrolled in advanced math and science classes and graduated as valedictorian of her class at Roosevelt Senior High School in Washington, D.C.
In 1964 Jackson enrolled at MIT, where she studied physics. She was one of only two African American female undergraduate students. After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in fall 1968, Jackson sought to create a community for Black students. She helped organize the Black Student Union and created proposals to recruit more Black students and faculty to MIT. That same year, Jackson graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in physics. Jackson began her physics career at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (later Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. In 1973 Jackson became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, which she received in particle physics.
While at Bell, Laboratories, she met her future husband, Morris A. Washington, another prominent physicist. Jackson remained at Bell until 1991; her research there contributed to the inventions of the touch-tone telephone, fiber-optic cables, caller ID, and call waiting.
In 1995 U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Jackson head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the government agency that oversees the use of nuclear materials in the United States. She was the first African American woman to serve in the position. Jackson returned to academic life in 1999, when she was appointed president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. She was the first Black woman to serve as the president of a major technological institute.