Kick-Ass Women from History #10: Margaret Hamilton
Kick-Ass Women from History #10: Margaret HamiltonN.B. I was going to originally do an article about Mother Jones as #10, but this untimely news has derailed that and I instead pushed up converting my notes for Margaret Hamilton into a full article. Watch this space for Mother Jones in the (hopefully) near future.
You have all seen the image before. A young woman stands next to a stack of bound computer paper. There may or may not be a caption that tells you she is standing next to code she wrote by hand that guided Apollo astronauts to the moon in 1969. She is smiling, perhaps a bit shyly, as she looks over the work that she wrought.
This is the first view most people have of Margaret Hamilton. It is the first image of her that is in this essay. But unlike most of my other Kick-Ass Women from History articles, this will not be the only one. Because there are many facets to Margaret Hamilton and they illustrate a much broader and far more impressive story of this kick-ass woman.
Let's get this out of the way first...The Manosphere doesn't like Margaret Hamilton. While they thump their chests and claim that no woman has invented anything of value, Margaret Hamilton keeps getting dropped on them like napalm, coating their rhetoric with clinging, burning truth.
They try to deflect this rain of truth bombs. She was "more a manager", then hastily correct to "stenographer" because the suggestion that a woman could even run a department of men is as bad as a woman making anything of value.
They even try to downgrade the field itself, claiming that at the time programming was a low-grade job like data entry, textile work, or clerical work—all fields quite "coincidentally" dominated by women at the time.
They are, of course incorrect, not least of which is the fact that Margaret is why software is no longer considered a low-grade job.
The truthHistorians, programmers who were living at the time, and the scientific community know otherwise. She is treated with immense reverence as a foundational pillar of modern computing. She is known to have:
- been the primary architect effectively inventing (and definitely naming) the discipline of software engineering;
- established the standards still held to this day for error detection and correction that underpin modern, safety-critical software systems;
- saved the Apollo 11 moon landing, by virtue of her software correctly identifying a critical problem (the famed "1201/1202 Alarms" in the last minutes of landing), putting the correct tasks at the highest priority and dropping lower priority tasks, preventing a disastrous system crash and aborted landing.
And if that was all she ever did she already belongs in the annals of important, influential women.
Margaret Elaine Heafield was born August 17, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (née Partington). After moving to Michigan, Margaret eventually graduated from Hancock High School in 1954.
She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, following in her mother's footsteps. She earned a BA in mathematics with, courtesy of her poet father and headmaster grandfather's influence, a minor in philosophy in 1958. Florence Long, the head of the math department at Earlham, is cited as another influence, the one leading her to pursue abstract mathematics with a goal of becoming a mathematics professor.
CareerAlthough originally intending to enroll in graduate study at Brandeis University, she instead found herself working for famous meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, later famous for his "attractors" and the creation of the entire realm of chaos theory. Her software for predicting weather contributed, as attested by Lorenz himself, to his future publications on that new field of maths.
SAGEIn 1961, after training her replacement, Margaret continued in her new career as a programmer by joining the Semi-Autonomous Ground Environment (SAGE) program. She was one of the programmers who worked on the XD-1 computer and the SAGE system, a spin-off of the weather-predicting Project Whirlwind that was used in military air defense.
SAGE was the crucible in which Margaret learned the unforgiving stakes of safety-critical computing. Her successes in this project made her the undisputed choice to ultimately head up development of the Apollo flight software.
ApolloThe Apollo project put the tasks considered least important, governing situations deemed least likely to occur, to the junior programmers like Margaret. It was in these least important tasks that her critical attention to error detection and handling shone through. Citing Margaret herself:
"The first assignment they gave me for the unmanned missions was to write a program for the computer that it would go to if there was an abort," she recalled. "I wrote the program and called it 'Forget It' because 'forget it' if it aborts."
The brass gave this task to her because it was considered highly unlikely that an abort would ever occur. When the next unmanned mission was sent, needless to say the "highly unlikely" event occurred and the craft did, in fact, abort. Her code worked exactly as intended and she turned out to be the only person who could read what the computer was doing. As a result, she quickly climbed the ranks at MIT until she wound up as the Director of the Software Engineering Division and lead developer for the on-board flight software for the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer). It was there that her experience in the SAGE crucible came to the forefront and led, ultimately, to the famous 1201/1202 Alarms that saved the moon landing.
Not mentioned in the whirlwind history above is that Margaret was married. Indeed her serendipitous employment by Lorenz was a result of her husband's move to Cambridge as he pursued his own degree at Harvard. A working mother in the 1960s had very little institutional support. MIT only cared that she knew what she was doing and could solve problems by a deadline. As a result she wound up working late, working on weekends, bringing her child to work with her at nights and on weekends so she could do the double duty of mothering and making the AGC work.
One frequently told anecdote about that period is that her daughter, in playing astronaut, had caused the simulation to crash. Margaret figured out why (in effect something was activated while something else incompatible was running) and brought it up to her superiors. They thought it incredible that a trained astronaut would make such an error and told her to ignore it.
Then Jim Lovell, as Apollo 8 orbited the moon, made exactly that error and accidentally wiped out all the navigational data the astronauts needed to get back home. Because of Hamilton's notes on the issue, they were able to quickly diagnose the problem, recreate the data, and bring the astronauts back home.
The error detection that Margaret had requested to put in was subsequently put in.
Post-ApolloHad Margaret stopped where she was she would be rightly hailed as a major force in the creation of the entire field of software engineering. But she didn't. After Apollo she formed, together with Saydean Zeldin, the Higher Order Software (HOS) company to further develop and advocate for ideas about error prevention and fault tolerance emerging from their joint work on the Apollo project. They developed a methodology, and a product (USE.IT) based upon it which was used in several successful government projects. Much of what was developed at HOS influenced embedded and safety-critical software systems for decades afterward.
She left HOS in 1985 and went on to form, in 1986, Hamilton Technologies, Inc., a company based around her Universal Systems Language (USL) and a suite of tools to use it for creating reliable software.
Legacy and AccoladesHamilton named the discipline of software engineering. When she started in her work, like a stopped clock, the manosphere was right: software was not viewed as a serious field in engineering or science. Her tireless efforts to make software reliable and fault tolerant, however, caused people to start taking the phrase she'd coined seriously until even hardware engineers started to agree with her that software was its own engineering discipline and deserved to be regarded as such. If you use any kind of safety-critical or fault-tolerant software (and I guarantee you that, as you read this, you likely have dozens of examples within arms' reach of you!) you owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Hamilton.
But don't just take my word for it. Take the word of the Association for Women in Computing, who gave her the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award in 1986. Take the word of NASA (2003), Earlham College (2009), and the Computer History Museum (2017). Take the word of the academic world, which granted her honorary doctorates from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and Bard College. And, ultimately, take the word of the United States government, when President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. All told, there is more than enough reason to consider Margaret Hamilton a Kick-Ass Woman from History.
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