Word: broking
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...Dickson had devised a talking-movie machine as early as 1889. In the early '20s short sound films appeared featuring vaudeville and opera stars. These were sensible, tentative steps; now the maverick Warner brothers made a great leap of faith. Their Jazz Singer wasn't a true "talkie''; it broke free from silent-screen traditions only for brief dialogue and a few songs. Nor was the story, about a cantor's son who goes into show business, at all modern. But Jolson's hip-swiveling salesmanship (he was in many ways the Elvis of his day) put over the novelty...
...thought that it was something terrible and that we should be ready to meet the emergency. We packed our valises in case we needed to leave. We heard people coming closer, and we tried to lock our door. I don't know if we opened it or if they broke it, but they were Nazis dressed as civilians. They said, "Throw your bags against the windows." And they went down the hall and threw three typewriters against the windows, and then they came back and went to the big dormitory room and broke several more things, like the faucets...
...want to go up to the deck and exercise, but I don't have any shoes." So I said, "I don't think my shoes will fit you." But that didn't stop him. He tried to get a shoe on, but his foot was so large, it broke my shoe right in half. He apologized, and I got it sewed up. It cost me 50¢, and I got a souvenir...
...taking humankind into outer space. His XS-1 had accelerated to Mach 1.06, or 700 m.p.h. That night Yeager fixed his buddies a pitcher of martinis to celebrate. But the world would have to wait to learn of Yeager's feat. It was all top secret until Aviation Week broke the story in December. The government wouldn't come around to confirming it had happened until May 1948. --By Cathy Booth Thomas
...goals, the instinctive and the transcendent. Though the role unnerved him, it was secured forever in 1956, when he died, like James Dean, in a car crash. But by that time the energies he had released were in motion everywhere. The painter Willem de Kooning said it best: "He broke the ice." True enough, but it broke him too. --By Richard Lacayo