The Speed of Sound on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Chuck Yeager became the first person to exceed the speed of sound on this day in history. Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager was a United States Air Force officer, flying ace, and record-setting test pilot. Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, in level flight while piloting the X-1 Glamorous Glennis at Mach 1.05 at an altitude of 45,000 ft over the Rogers Dry Lake of the Mojave Desert in California. The success of the mission was not announced to the public for nearly eight months, until June 10, 1948.

The speed of sound is the distance travelled per unit of time by a sound wave as it propagates through an elastic medium. At 68 °F, the speed of sound in air is about 343 metres per second (1,125 ft/s; 1,235 km/h; 767 mph), or one kilometre in 2.91 s or one mile in 4.69 s. It depends strongly on temperature as well as the medium through which a sound wave is propagating. At 0 °C (32 °F), the speed of sound in air is about 331 m/s (1,086 ft/s; 1,192 km/h; 740 mph). 

The sound barrier or sonic barrier is the large increase in aerodynamic drag and other undesirable effects experienced by an aircraft or other object when it approaches the speed of sound. When aircraft first approached the speed of sound, these effects were seen as constituting a barrier, making faster speeds very difficult or impossible. The term sound barrier is still sometimes used today to refer to aircraft approaching supersonic flight in this high drag regime. Flying faster than sound produces a sonic boom.

A sonic boom is a sound associated with shock waves created when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms generate enormous amounts of sound energy, sounding similar to an explosion or a thunderclap to the human ear. The boom is not deadly but it can cause some severe damage to the body and hearing if you happen to be at the exact spot of the boom. The boom can and has caused a lot if damage to homes in the past, thus the restriction for such flights over populated areas.

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