Let's rewind back to 1946, just a year after the 2nd world war had ended. The USA and allies had decisively won a military campaign aganist the Germans and it's allies. A key ingredient to success was due to the aircraft used.
In the mid 1930's, it was of great interest to build an aircraft that could break the "sound barrier". The challenge was to research the aerodynamics of supersonic speeds, which meant what happened to an airplane as it accelereated through the speed of sound. To find a solution to these hindrances, the British and American decided to research by developing transonic models of aircraft and essentially flying them in many conditions. It was like making the sky a laboratory where the planes where chemicals.
Soon enough, both the British and Americans arrived at an identical aircraft configuration, in which the contours of the projected aircraft were shaped after the lines of a machine gun bullet. In March 1945, the production of the first prototype of this aircraft configuration started. The aircraft was named as the X-1.
The X-1 took the shape of a bullet with wings, the airframe was small to speak - only 31 ft. long and a wingspan of 28 ft. The only worrying design of the aircraft would be the cockpit design, in which the pilot literally had to crawl into the cockpit. In the case of emergencies, exiting the plane could have absolutely harmful effects.
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