Grace Brewster Hopper blazed a trail in the 20th century by simply not taking no for an answer.
Some children are born to be engineers, much to the dismay of their parents. Grace Brewster Murray (later Hopper) was just seven when she decided to take apart a family clock to see how it worked. But as many an engineer has found to their cost, taking a machine apart is a lot easier than putting it back together again. Grace was not dismayed, however, and proceeded to take apart another six clocks to see if she could work it out.
Another child might have expected a firm word or two when they were discovered in a pile of cogs in a now timeless house. But Grace’s parents were different. Her mother had wanted to follow her own father into engineering – he was a senior civil engineer for the city of New York – but in the late 1800s she was forbidden from taking algebra or trigonometry as she was a girl. The same would not happen to her daughter. While six clocks were removed from little Grace’s...