No one ever told me that . . .

Deborah Sampson was so determined to fight in the American Revolution that she dressed in men’s clothing to enlist in the Continental forces under the name of Robert Shurtliffe. Her true identity was discovered only when she was wounded. She was personally discharged by George Washington, and honored after the war for her bravery.

Elizabeth Blackwell, rejected by 17 U.S. medical schools because she was a woman, was accepted at Geneva Medical College with great hilarity in the belief that it was a spoof perpetrated by a rival school. Quiet and determined, she overcame the hostility of her professors to become the first woman to earn a degree in medicine at an American college in 1849, graduating at the top of her class. Her name was not mentioned in the commencement program.

Bessie Coleman was the first African-American pilot. She grew up dreaming of a career in aviation but was not allowed to attend U.S. flight schools, so she trained in France, then returned to specialize in stunt flying and parachute jumping as a barn-storming entertainer in the 1920s.

Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood actress of the 1930s and 40s, was also a brilliant scientist who developed and held the patent on a variable-frequency transmitting device that helped prevent the Nazis from jamming Naval communications in World War II. She received no money for her invention and her story was treated as classified information by the government until 1963. The cellular communica-tions industry of today is built on the technology she developed.

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, U.S. Navy, was a mathematical genius who helped usher in the computer age by helping to develop the world’s first electronic computer in the 1940s. She wrote the first automatic computer program and invented several computer languages still in use today. She also coined the term “computer bug” after she found a moth had shorted out two vacuum tubes!