Gladys West, an African-American female from rural Virginia, was a key figure in the development of GPS (the Global Positioning System) in the 1950s and 1960s. GPS has changed the lives of almost everyone. All segments of society use the Global Positioning System—the military, the auto industry, the cell phone industry, NASA, social media, etc. Billions of people use GPS in their car or on their phone.
West was an integral figure in the development of this system. Her humble nature kept this fact unknown by many of her friends, including her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters, until she was writing a short biographical note about herself in 2017 for a sorority function that recognized senior members of the group. In her humble manner, she just happened to mention that she was a part of the team that developed the Global Positioning System in the 1950s and 1960s.
In a 2017 message about Black History Month, Captain Godfrey Weekes, commanding officer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division where West worked, said the following:
“She rose through the ranks, worked on the satellite geodesy [science that measures the size and shape of Earth] and contributed to the accuracy of GPS and the measurement of satellite data. As Gladys West started her career as a mathematician at Dahlgren in 1956, she likely had no idea that her work would impact the world for decades to come.”
Gladys West was born in Dinwiddie County, south of Richmond, in 1931. Knowing she did not want to work in the fields, picking tobacco, corn, and cotton, or a nearby factory, beating tobacco leaves into pieces small enough for cigarettes and pipes, she determined to use education to enable her to pursue other options.
She earned a B.S. degree in mathematics at Virginia State College, finishing as valedictorian. After teaching a couple of years, she went back to school and obtained an M.S. in mathematics, and sought other opportunities, landing at the Dahlgren Facility. Her mathematical calculations eventually led to satellites.
She collected information from the orbiting machines, focusing on information that helped to determine their exact location as they transmitted from around the world. She entered data into large scale computers and worked on computer software that processed information about precise surface elevations.
She became project manager of the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite that could remotely sense oceans. In 1979, she received a formal commendation for her work as a programmer in the Dahlgren Division for large-scale computers and a project manager for data-processing systems used in the analysis of satellite data. In 1986, West published Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter, A 60-page illustrated guide.
