Word: sonic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Even if Vicky did speed faster than sound (as some British newspapers but no responsible British scientists claimed), she could not claim to have cracked the sonic barrier. Vicky got help from gravity, losing altitude all the time. According to the rules, a true airplane must at least fly level...
Squabble. When U.S. air scientists heard the triumphant trumpetings of the British press, they protested that they, too, had shot rocket-driven missiles through the sonic barrier. So they had, but their missiles were even less airplanelike than Vicky. Even the initially controlled V-2 (which reaches nearly five times the speed of sound) is not supported by the air, as a genuine airplane must be. The U.S. Navy's ramjet, or "flying stovepipe," is merely a power plant boosted into the air for a brief, uncontrolled flight...
...Continent Lost. The Atlantis (jointly sponsored by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Columbia University and the National Geographic Society) was equipped with sonic depth-finders, seismographs and other up-to-date gadgets of sea-bottom exploration. Most promising work was done by dredges, which brought up samples of rock. The rocks have not yet been studied, but Columbia's Professor Maurice Ewing, head of the expedition, hopes that they will tell much about the geological origin of the underwater range...
...speed of sound in the air through which the plane is passing. In the warm air near the ground it is about 765 m.p.h., but it falls (to about 650 m.p.h. at 40,000 ft.) in the cold air of high altitudes. Well below these speeds, the "sonic barrier" makes itself felt, jamming an airplane's controls, destroying the lift of its wings. The P-80R got up to Mach .81 last week over the hot, sun-baked desert. If it had flown at 20,000 ft., it would have met less resistance from the thin upper...
...risk) to cross the supersonic thresholds of the mind-the point at which the familiar sound-lengths of human life dissolve into inhuman silence. If they pass the barrier of dissolution, they may investigate in uncompetitive privacy the mysteries inaudible to the other minds. If they can recross the sonic sill, alive and sane, they may report what they have experienced to men who, never having known the experience, will never quite understand the report. Franz Kafka ventured across the barrier, reported with an apparent lucidity the cryptographs of silence, and was little understood. "Franz Kafka," wrote Franz Werfel...