Oct 14, 1947:
Yeager breaks sound barrier

U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed "Glamorous Glennis," was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager's achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.



Oct 14, 1962:
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins on October 14, 1962, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba—capable of carrying nuclear warheads—were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline.

Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba had been steadily increasing since the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban refugees, armed and trained by the United States, landed in Cuba and attempted to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Though the invasion did not succeed, Castro was convinced that the United States would try again, and set out to get more military assistance from the Soviet Union. During the next year, the number of Soviet advisors in Cuba rose to more than 20,000. Rumors began that Russia was also moving missiles and strategic bombers onto the island. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev may have decided to so dramatically up the stakes in the Cold War for several reasons. He may have believed that the United States was indeed going to invade Cuba and provided the weapons as a deterrent. Facing criticism at home from more hard-line members of the Soviet communist hierarchy, he may have thought a tough stand might win him support. Khrushchev also had always resented that U.S. nuclear missiles were stationed near the Soviet Union (in Turkey, for example), and putting missiles in Cuba might have been his way of redressing the imbalance. Two days after the pictures were taken, after being developed and analyzed by intelligence officers, they were presented to President Kennedy. During the next two weeks, the United States and the Soviet Union would come as close to nuclear war as they ever had, and a fearful world awaited the outcome.



Oct 14, 1912:
Theodore Roosevelt shot in Milwaukee

Roosevelt, who suffered only a flesh wound from the attack, went on to deliver his scheduled speech with the bullet still in his body. After a few words, the former "Rough Rider" pulled the torn and bloodstained manuscript from his breast pocket and declared, "You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose." He spoke for nearly an hour and then was rushed to the hospital.

Despite his vigorous campaign, Roosevelt, who served as the 26th U.S. president from 1901 to 1909, was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in November. Shrank was deemed insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he died in 1943.



Oct 14, 1964:
King wins Nobel Peace Prize

African American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to racial segregation. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and their nonviolent movement gained momentum.

A powerful orator, he appealed to Christian and American ideals and won growing support from the federal government and northern whites. In 1963, he led his massive March on Washington, in which he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" address. In 1964, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. In October of that year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated the prize money, valued at $54,600, to the civil rights movement.

In the late 1960s, King openly criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam and turned his efforts to winning economic rights for poor Americans. By that time, the civil rights movement had begun to fracture, with activists such as Stokely Carmichael rejecting King's vision of nonviolent integration in favor of African American self-reliance and self-defense. In 1968, King intended to revive his movement through an interracial "Poor People's March" on Washington, but on April 4 he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, by escaped white convict James Earl Ray, just a few weeks before the demonstration was scheduled to begin.



Oct 14, 1957:
"Wake Up Little Susie" becomes the Everly Brothers' first #1 hit

Harmony singing was a part of rock and roll right from the beginning, but the three- and four-part harmonies of doo-wop, derived from black gospel and blues traditions, would never have given us Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles or the Byrds. To get those groups, you first had to have the Everly Brothers, whose ringing, close-harmony style introduced a whole new sound into the rock-and-roll vocabulary: the sound of Appalachia set to hard-driving acoustic guitars and a subtle backbeat rhythm. One of the most important and influential groups in the history of rock and roll, the Everly Brothers burst onto the music scene in 1957 with their first big hit, "Bye Bye Love," which was quickly followed with their first #1 song, "Wake Up Little Susie," which topped the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1957.

Don and Phil Everly began performing together professionally in 1945 at the ages of eight and six, respectively, on their family's live radio show out of Shenandoah, Iowa. The Everly family resettled to Knoxville, Tennesee, in 1953, and two years later, 18-year-old Don and 16-year-old Phil began pursuing work as songwriters in Nashville. As a songwriting duo, they had very little success, and in their first try at making a record of their own, they couldn't even crack the lowest level of the Country & Western chart. A move to Cadence Records in 1957, however, changed the course of the Everly Brothers' career, bringing them into partnership with a production team that included legendary session man Chet Atkins and the songwriting team of Felice and Boudreaux Bryant.

"Bye Bye Love" was the first song by the Bryants to be recorded by the Everlys, establishing their trademark sound and peaking at #2 on the charts in the summer of 1957. The follow-up single, "Wake Up Little Susie," reached the top spot on October 14, 1957, though not without stirring controversy in some parts due to lyrics that hinted at teenage sex. Literally banned in Boston at one point, the Everlys' first chart-topper was taken at face value in most parts of the country as an insanely catchy song about two teenagers who have innocently fallen asleep at a movie only to awaken at 4:00 AM in fear of having ruined their good reputations.

The Everly Brothers would earn 25 top-40 hits over the first five years of their hugely influential recording career, including two more #1s: "All I Have To Do Is Dream" (1958) and "Cathy's Clown" (1960).