1940's Science and Technology

by Peter Laffey

The Bell X-1

 

The Bell x-1 revolutionized modern flight, because it
did what many people thought impossible and broke the
sound barrier on October 14, 1947. Piloted by Chuck
Yeager, it was dropped out of a larger plane, and
free-fell until Yeager ignited the engines. At first
it was going just as fast as normal airplane, but then
Yeager slowly eased up on the throttle and began to go
supersonic. The fastest speed the Bell x-1 reached was
Mach 1.6, or 1.6 times the speed of sound. This was an
amazing achievement because this was such an
unbelievable thing. It revolutionized flight as we
know it, allowing military planes to drop bombs faster
and civilians to get from place to place faster.

users.dbscorp.net/ jmustain/x1.htm

members.tripod.com/derekhorne/yeagerx1.html

ENIAC

ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer, was so huge that when it was completed in
1945 it filled an entire room. Its main use was in
ballistics trajectory programming. It was programmed
like a telephone switch board, which made it very
tedious to operate, but once you had all the necessary
changes made you could get a result in less than
thirty seconds. The main way it worked was with vacuum
tubes that kept blowing out, taking days to fix, but
sometimes it would run smoothly for days on end. When
people saw the ease with which they could get results,
they began to search, like all humans, for an easier
way to do so. The end result is the machine that I
typed this with, the personal computer. The creators
of ENAIC, had they seen me type this, would have
thought that all their work paid off.

photo2.si.edu/infoage/ eniac.gif

ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html

Note all the wires, which made fixing the machine very complicated

Back to Decades Topics