Okay, so you just tapped on your phone, didn’t you? Pulled up Maps, Waze, whatever. You typed in an address, maybe you’re headed to that new sushi place or just trying to avoid traffic. And poof – directions. Instant. Flawless. Most of us don’t even think about it. It’s just… there. Like gravity or bad coffee at the office. But here’s the thing, that magical voice telling you to turn left in 200 feet? That seamless little blue dot on your screen? It wouldn’t exist, not like we know it, without a woman named Dr. Gladys West. And if you’re like me, you probably didn’t know her name until, well, pretty recently. And that, my friends, is a damn shame.

The OG Navigator Who Got Overlooked

Dr. Gladys West, who just passed away at 95 (and yeah, that’s what sparked a lot of these stories finally bubbling up, isn’t it? A little late, if you ask me), was one of those unsung heroes. A Black woman, working as a mathematician at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division – Dahlgren, Virginia, for those keeping score – back in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Think about that for a second. The deep South. Mid-century. A Black woman. And she’s basically building the foundation for what would become GPS.

I mean, this wasn’t some cushy desk job in Silicon Valley with free kombucha. This was hardcore, complex, brain-melting work. She was part of a team, sure, but her specific gig involved analyzing satellite data. And not just looking at it, but modeling the Earth’s shape. You know, making those incredibly precise calculations about gravity, tides, the exact contours of the planet. Because if you want to ping a satellite and get an accurate location back, you need to know exactly what you’re measuring against. And the Earth, turns out, isn’t a perfect sphere. Shocker, right? It’s lumpy. It’s got divots. It’s irregular. And Gladys West was the one figuring out those irregularities, turning them into mathematical models. Her work, specifically on the geoid (that’s the fancy name for the theoretical shape of the Earth based on gravity), was absolutely critical. Critical, critical, critical.

The “Human Computer” Era

You hear stories about these “human computers,” especially Black women, who were doing these incredible calculations for NASA and other agencies back then. Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan – we know their names now, thanks to “Hidden Figures” and a lot of overdue recognition. Dr. West was part of that same generation, that same often-invisible workforce. They were brilliant, they were meticulous, and they were, frankly, indispensable. They were doing the math that machines couldn’t quite handle yet, or that needed human oversight and ingenuity. And then, once the machines got better, their contributions often got, shall we say, filed away.

So, Why Didn’t We Know Her?

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Or maybe the multi-billion-dollar question, given what GPS is worth to the global economy. Part of it is probably just how science and military projects work – it’s usually teams, and the individual gets lost in the shuffle. Another part? Well, let’s not be naive. A Black woman in a highly technical, largely white, male-dominated field in the mid-20th century? It doesn’t exactly scream “center of attention, big public accolades.” It just doesn’t. And that’s not cynicism talking, that’s just looking at history, if I’m being honest. It’s a pattern we’ve seen, over and over again. People whose work was foundational, revolutionary even, get shunted to the side, their names collecting dust in some obscure archive.

“The stories we tell about who invented what, who discovered what, those stories shape our understanding of the world. And when those stories are incomplete, we’re all missing out.”

Her work was so important, it contributed directly to the development of the Global Positioning System. And yeah, GPS was a military project initially, then it got opened up to civilians. And the rest, as they say, is history. But a lot of that history, the human history behind the tech, it gets erased or just, like, never written down in the first place. This is a woman who went to college on a full scholarship – a full scholarship – in the 1940s, majored in math, taught math, got her master’s, then went to work for the Navy. She wasn’t just smart; she was relentlessly driven. She had to be, to get where she got, to do what she did.

What This Actually Means

Look, the fact that we’re only really talking about Dr. Gladys West now, after her passing, it’s bittersweet. It’s good that she got some recognition in her later years – she was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018, which is cool. But it feels a little like, “better late than never, but why so late?” Her story isn’t just about GPS, it’s about all the other Gladys Wests out there, the people whose names we still don’t know, whose contributions are still buried under layers of institutional forgetfulness or systemic bias. It’s a reminder that history isn’t static; it’s a living thing that we constantly have to re-examine, dig into, and correct. We need to be better at finding these stories, celebrating these people, while they’re still here to see it. Because who knows how many other incredible minds, how many other game-changing ideas, are out there, just waiting for someone to finally give them their due…