CHUCK YEAGER
FAME LANDED ON 24-year-old Charles Elwood Yeager with a bang. Specifically, it arrived at 45,000ft above the Mojave Desert on 14 October 1947 when, in extreme pain from broken ribs sustained two days earlier, he squeezed into the Bell X-1 – an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-propelled projectile inscribed ‘Glamorous Glennis’ after his wife – and became the first man to break the sound barrier.
The ‘top secret’ news was not made public until eight months later when, for a while, ‘Chuck’ Yeager became the most famous man in magazine.
