For aviation, the spirit of the 1950s could be said to have begun with Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the “sound barrier” in Glamorous Glennis, a rocket-powered Bell X-1, on Oct. 14, 1947. The World War that had dominated the first half of the 1940s was receding in memory, and mankind’s focus on ascending from the rubble was illustrated clearly by the advances in aviation. Yeager’s flight symbolized the efforts that would drive the 1950s, and the jet engine was to shape that decade more than any other technology.
With its straight but suitably thin wings, upright vertical tail and plump fuselage, the X-1 did not look altogether the part for the first airplane to exceed Mach 1. But on that fall day from some 42,000 feet above the dry lakebeds of the Mojave Desert in Calif., a man-made sonic boom by an airplane that held together rent the air asunder for the first time. Part of the legend of that day is that Yeager was barely fit to make the flight, having fallen and cracked a rib two days earlier. As he clambered down from the B-29 mother ship’s bomb bay and shoehorned himself into the X-1’s cramped cockpit, he was in pain and carrying part of a broom handle that would allow him, despite his injuries, to secure the cockpit hatch once inside.
