William Boeing

William Boeing: The Lumberman Who Built an Airplane

In 1915, on Lake Union in Seattle, a thirty-three-year-old timber millionaire climbed onto the wing of Terah Maroney's Curtiss floatplane and went up. He came down convinced. When he later bought a Martin hydroaeroplane and his test pilot damaged it, and Glenn Martin's people said the replacement parts would take months, Boeing turned to a Navy engineer named Conrad Westervelt and made the remark that founded an industry: we could build a better plane ourselves, and build it faster.

German Money, American Timber

William Edward Böing was born in Detroit on 1 October 1881 to Marie Ortmann, from Vienna, and Wilhelm Böing, a mining engineer from Hohenlimburg in Germany who had emigrated in 1868 and made a fortune from timber and mineral rights on Minnesota's Mesabi Range. His father died of influenza in 1890, when William was eight, and his mother took the family to Europe. He went to school in Vevey, Switzerland, then to St Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and in 1898 enrolled at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School to read engineering.

He dropped out in 1903 and went into lumber. At twenty-two he moved to Hoquiam, Washington, and built up extensive timberland holdings around Grays Harbor on the Olympic Peninsula, prospering in a construction boom and shipping lumber east through the newly opened Panama Canal. That business supplied the capital, and — not incidentally — the expertise. Early aircraft were structures of spruce and wire and fabric, and Boeing understood wood.

The Bluebill

He had first seen a powered aircraft fly at Seattle's Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, and had tried and failed to cadge a ride from the French aviator Louis Paulhan at the Dominguez flying meet in Los Angeles in 1910. After the 1915 flights with Maroney he took lessons at Glenn L. Martin's flying school and bought a Martin TA.

The aircraft he and Westervelt then designed, the B & W, improved on the Martin chiefly by using two pontoons instead of one. Christened *Bluebill*, it first flew on 15 June 1916. A month later, on 15 July 1916, Boeing incorporated Pacific Aero Products Company in a former shipyard on the Duwamish River, transferring four aircraft and associated property into it. On 18 April 1917, after America entered the war, he renamed it the Boeing Airplane Company. *Bluebill* and her sister *Mallard* were eventually sold to a flying school in New Zealand — the first Boeing export.

Contracts, Mail and an Empire

The Navy's order for fifty aircraft, following the American entry into the war, was what turned a rich man's workshop into a manufacturer. When the war ended and orders collapsed, the company survived on whatever it could build — the plant turned out furniture and boats — while Boeing kept it alive out of his own pocket.

What rescued it was mail. On 3 March 1919, Boeing and the pilot Eddie Hubbard flew sixty letters from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Lake Union in a Boeing C-700 seaplane: the first delivery of international airmail into the United States. Airmail contracts became the commercial foundation of American aviation, and Boeing understood earlier than most that whoever carried the mail could also carry passengers. In 1929 he opened the Boeing School of Aeronautics in Oakland, and joined Frederick Rentschler of Pratt & Whitney to form the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, a vertically integrated colossus that made the airframes, made the engines, and flew the routes — the airlines consolidated as United Air Lines.

The Break-Up, and the Exit

It was too much concentration for Washington to tolerate. After Postmaster General Walter Brown's so-called Spoils Conferences carved up the airmail routes among the big operators, the Roosevelt administration cancelled the contracts outright, and Senator Hugo Black's committee began investigating. Boeing testified. The investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but the personal attacks left him permanently embittered. The Air Mail Act of 1934 forced United Aircraft and Transport to split into three — United Aircraft Corporation, the Boeing Airplane Company, and United Air Lines — and banned aircraft manufacturers from owning airlines.

The same year he received the Daniel Guggenheim Medal. He took it and walked away, at fifty-two, from the industry he had created.

The Long Retirement

He spent the rest of his life on property, Wall Street investments, thoroughbred horse breeding and sailing. He and his wife Bertha subdivided land north of Seattle between 1935 and 1944 — and attached racially restrictive covenants to the properties, barring sale to non-white buyers except as domestic servants, a practice of his class and era that is now part of his record and belongs there. He lived in The Highlands, donated that mansion to Children's Orthopedic Hospital in 1950, and kept a 650-acre estate east of Seattle called Aldarra.

On 14 May 1954 he and Bertha attended the roll-out of the Boeing 367-80, the prototype of the 707 and the aircraft that would put the world on jets. He was a spectator at his own company by then. He died of a heart attack aboard his yacht *Taconite* on 28 September 1956, three days short of seventy-five, and his ashes were scattered off the British Columbia coast where he had spent so much of his time sailing.

Why William Is Called a Genius

Boeing's gift was not invention. He designed no breakthrough airfoil and solved no problem of aerodynamics; the B & W was a modest improvement on a Martin design, executed with a Navy engineer's help. What he had, in his son's description, was a particular cast of mind: he "pursued his curiosity, studied things carefully, and never dismissed the novel." That last clause is the whole of it. In 1915 the aeroplane was a fairground novelty that had killed a great many of the people who flew it, and the rational thing for a wealthy lumberman to do was admire it and go back to timber. Boeing instead read the machine as an industry in embryo, and committed his fortune, his materials knowledge and his patience to it — through the ruinous postwar slump when his factory was making furniture to stay open.

The second act of judgement was structural rather than technical: seeing that airframes, engines and airline routes were one business, and assembling United Aircraft and Transport to prove it. The government destroyed that vision in 1934 on antitrust grounds, and he never forgave the humiliation, but the logic was sound enough that the industry has been reassembling versions of it ever since.

The honest counter-case is that this is the genius of capital and nerve, not of intellect. He hired the engineers; his advantage began with inherited money; and he left the business two decades before the aircraft that made his name a global noun — the 707, the 747 — were even conceived. He also attached racial covenants to the land he sold. What is undeniable is that a company still recognisably his exists because one man in 1916 believed a flimsy wooden seaplane was the start of something.

Legacy

Boeing was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966 and the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 1984. The company he incorporated on the Duwamish in July 1916 became, for most of the following century, the world's principal builder of large aircraft — and the phrase he threw at Conrad Westervelt out of irritation with a slow parts order turned out to be the founding document.

Achievements

• National Aviation Hall of Fame — 1966
• Educated at Yale University, Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science and Sheffield Scientific School
• Worked as entrepreneur, businessperson and engineer