On this day in 1937, Craig Breedlove, the man who would set the land-speed records for travelling 400, 500, and 600 mph in a wheeled vehicle, was born.

Breedlove used the Spirit of America, the three-wheeled, jet-engine powered vehicle that he designed himself, to set the speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Spirit of America thundered across the drag racing strip at Bonneville using an engine borrowed from a J-47 airplane. Breedlove’s first record-setting run took him to 407 miles per hour on the salt flats in 1962.

In 1965 he beat his own record twice, hitting 555 miles per hour in a new, four-wheeled version of the Spirit of America on Nov. 2 and blasting past that at 600 mph on Nov. 15. Breedlove held the land speed record until October of 1970, when Gary Gabelich hit 622 mph in the rocket-powered Blue Flame. Breedlove worked as a real estate agent after moving on from his racing career, but did work on another rocket car, the Spirit of America Formula Shell LSRV, in the 1990s without breaking the 763 mph record which had been set in 1996 by Andy Green. Breedlove died in 2007, in a plane crash.