alt Hacker Newswhat? she was doing a form of crystallography that ONLY makes sense if it's a helix? Like, any time you are doing fiber diffraction it's pretty much "a helix". Who claimed she didn't realize it was a helix? I thought the claim was that she didn't recognize the significance of the helical parameters, which of course she couldn't, she wasn't a chemist and didn't have a model in mind with knowable parameters.
She might have measured those parameters, but she still didn't know what she had (as evidenced by how she subsequently spent a ton of time on Z-dna)
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The point of the article is not to provide new information.
The point of the article is to create the impression in the reader that Franklin did everything of any importance and was robbed of credit by the white men riding her coattails.
It will work.
I beleive fibre diffraction also works on parallel fibres (non-helical). For example, long chains of beta-sheet (look at beta keratin, which is one of the early non-helical structures analyzed by Astbury).