The first person to break the sound barrier is 88 today.
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, with two ribs broken two nights before in a drunken horseback ride. He reached a speed of 700 miles per hour, or Mach 1.06, at an altitude of 43,000 feet. The plane, Glamorous Glennis, is hanging from the Air & Space Museum ceiling. Glennis was Mrs. Yeager.
Yeager told his story in Popular Mechanics in 1987. Good reading.
Yeager is the basis for the character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff. Glennis was played by Barbara Hershey.
In his wonderful book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe explains that West Virginian Yeager is the reason why all airline pilots talk with a drawl — to be like Yeager, “the most righteous of all the posessors of the right stuff.”