October 14 · This Day in America
Engineers think the sky has a wall in it. Planes that approach the speed of sound shake themselves apart; pilots have died trying. This morning a B-29 climbs over Rogers Dry Lake with a small orange rocket plane slung in its belly — the Bell X-1, named Glamorous Glennis for the pilot's wife. Chuck Yeager, twenty-four, had broken two ribs falling off a horse two nights before and told almost no one; he couldn't latch the hatch by hand, so he used a sawed-off broomstick. The X-1 drops, lights its rockets, and climbs. At about 43,000 feet the needle on the Mach meter jumps past 1 and keeps going — and a sonic boom rolls across the desert, the first ever made by a human being. Inside, it goes smooth and quiet. The wall was never a wall. It was only a thing we hadn't done yet. The space age starts in that calm.
Source: airandspace.si.edu
Also on this day · 1964
A phone rings in an Atlanta hospital room where Martin Luther King Jr. is resting on doctor's orders. It is Coretta. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize — at thirty-five, the youngest laureate then in its history, honored for a nonviolent struggle still being met with fire hoses and jail cells. He says the prize belongs to the movement, to thousands of unnamed people, and gives every dollar of it away to the cause.
Source: kinginstitute.stanford.edu