Word: sonics
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...both jet and rocket energy. Built by Douglas, the Skyrocket is a swordfish-shaped, back-swept-winged sister ship of the Navy's Skystreak, present holder of the world's speed record (650.6 m.p.h.). Douglasmen hoped that it would make air history by breaking through the sonic wall-i.e., by flying faster than the speed of sound (about 765 m.p.h. at sea level). ¶ In St. Louis, the McDonell Aircraft Corp. put the world's first ramjet helicopter* through its paces for the U.S. Air Force. In test flights, the 310-lb. "flying bike" readily lifted...
...firing tests, its six new .50 caliber M-3 guns pumped out lead 50% faster than the standard M-2 guns of World War II. The problem of firing high-powered machine-guns at near-sonic speeds had been licked...
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...