Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis
Bell Aircraft Corporation · 1946
A bright orange aircraft shaped like a bullet with stubby straight wings hangs in the Milestones hall, its nose painted with the name Glamorous Glennis. On the fourteenth of October 1947, over the Mojave desert in California, Captain Chuck Yeager of the United States Air Force dropped from the bomb bay of a B-29 in this machine, lit its four rocket chambers and became the first person to fly faster than sound, reaching Mach 1.06 at thirteen thousand metres. Two nights earlier he had broken two ribs falling off a horse, and he closed the cockpit door with a piece of broomstick because he could not lift his arm.
The X-1 was designed by Bell in 1945 to answer a single question: what happened to an aeroplane at the speed of sound, where wartime fighters had shaken themselves apart. The fuselage is modelled on a fifty calibre bullet, which engineers knew flew supersonically without trouble, and the thin wings are built to be stiff. Look at the tail, where the whole horizontal stabiliser could be moved as a unit; this all moving tail was the secret that kept control when the shock wave formed, and it became standard on every supersonic aircraft since. The rocket engine burned for only a few minutes, so the aircraft was carried aloft and dropped like a bomb.
Yeager named the aircraft after his wife, as he named all his machines. It made seventy eight flights before being retired and given to the Smithsonian in 1950, and it hung in the Arts and Industries Building before moving here in 1976. It was one of the original stars of the Milestones hall and returned there when the hall reopened in July 2025, alongside the X-15, which pushed the same idea to more than six times the speed of sound. Notice how small the cockpit is; Yeager was chosen partly because he fitted.
Did You Know? Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs, using a sawn off broom handle to lock the cockpit hatch because he could not raise his arm.
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