Let's not forget that the Americans were only able to go "supersonic" after having seen the "all-flying tailplane",
a British idea..
"In 1946 a team of American engineers from Bell Aviation, who were also working on a supersonic aircraft project, visited the top-secret research facility of the Miles Aircraft company. The British government instructed the company to co-operate fully with the Americans, in return for data on the United States' own supersonic programme4.
It is known that the Bell company had been having serious problems with control of their aircraft as it approached the sound barrier. The Miles team had overcome this snag with a completely new idea - the all-flying tailplane.
Basically, up until then, the horizontal tailplanes of all aircraft had been fitted with small flaps on their trailing edges to aid with vertical stability. The all-flying tailplane did away with these flaps, which were just not large enough to counteract the enormous forces encountered at supersonic speeds, and designed an aircraft where the entire horizontal tailplane pivoted, thus giving a much greater movable surface area with which to control the vertical pitch of the aircraft. This was a significant breakthrough, in fact Chuck Yeager5 is on record as saying that the single most significant contribution to the final success of the Bell XS-1 was the all-flying tailplane. "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A882272
