Friday, February 7, 2014

Day 7 more Black History facts


George Carruthers helmed the group of scientists that created the far ultraviolet camera/spectrograph, used in the 1972 Apollo 16 flight to the moon. His invention revealed new features in Earth's far-outer atmosphere and highlighted a variety of celestial objects from the perspective of the lunar surface. Carruthers was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2003.

Bessie Coleman (1892 -1926)
Bessie Coleman one of 13 children born to a Native American father and an African American mother. They lived in Texas and faced the kinds of difficulties many Black Americans faced at the time, including segregation and disenfranchisement. Bessie worked hard in her childhood, picking cotton and helping her mother with the laundry she took in. But Bessie didn't let any of it stop her. She educated herself and managed to graduate from high school. After seeing some newsreels on aviation, Bessie became interested in becoming a pilot, but no U.S flight schools would accept her because she was Black and because she was female. Undeterred, she saved enough money to go to France where she heard women could be pilots. In 1921, she became the first Black woman in the world to earn a pilot's license.

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