A Small Boom

Try to think about what the first man-made device was that broke the sound barrier. To remind you what the sound barrier is, you would have to travel 761 mph at sea level to reach the sound barrier. Since this speed is so fast, it is referred to as mach 1. If you know your history, you might remember Chuck Yeager officially breaking the sound barrier in 1947. But was this the first time anything man-made broke the sound barrier?

The answer to that is no, and it's a surprisingly simple answer. No one knows for sure what the first man-made device is that broke the sound barrier, but one of the top contenders is, believe it or not, the bullwhip. I know it sounds strange, but the "crack of the whip" is actually the sound of the end of the whip breaking the sound barrier.

There is a mathematical formula that shows how this is possible, but I don't want to confuse you all. The thing to keep in mind is that a whip typically is larger at the handle and gets smaller the closer it gets to the end. As your hand makes the motion for the whip to hit something, you create a wave of energy that travels down the whip. As the width of the whip decreases, the energy grows. This is simply because the energy is funneled into an increasingly smaller space, so it exponentially grows. The last motion of the whip is the tail end that "cracks" as it breaks the sound barrier, passing mach 1, and letting loose a small sonic boom.

Bet you didn't know that!