A Timber Baron's Airplane Company Takes Off
On July 15, 1916, lumber millionaire William E. Boeing founded the Pacific Aero Products Company in Seattle — the company that became Boeing.
The world's greatest airplane company was started by a man who made his fortune cutting down trees.
William E. Boeing was a wealthy timber baron with operations in Michigan and Washington State when he fell in love with flying in the early 1910s. He learned to fly, bought airplanes, and when one needed repairs, decided he could build a better one himself. He teamed up with Navy engineer George Conrad Westervelt, and together they designed a twin-float seaplane called the B&W — Boeing's first airplane.
On July 15, 1916, in Seattle, Washington, Boeing incorporated the Pacific Aero Products Company. A year later he renamed it the Boeing Airplane Company, and the name stuck. The first factory was a red barn on the Duwamish River in Seattle — the "Red Barn" — where workers built the B&W and the planes that followed. The barn still stands today as the centerpiece of Seattle's Museum of Flight, a shrine to the company's origins.
The timing was perfect. World War I created enormous demand for military aircraft, and Boeing grew fast. In 1919 the company's first commercial flying boat, the Boeing B-1, made its maiden flight and opened an international airmail route between Seattle and Victoria, B.C. In 1927, William Boeing's wife Bertha christened the first Boeing Air Transport airmail flight from San Francisco to Chicago — and on the return trip, the plane carried its first airline passenger. Three years later, registered nurse Ellen Church joined the crew of a Boeing Model 80A, becoming the world's first female flight attendant. Then came the Model 247 in 1933, the first truly modern airliner, and eventually the B-17, the B-29, and the 707 and 747 that made air travel ordinary for millions of people. In 1955 the Dash 80 prototype flew nonstop from Seattle to Washington, D.C. and back, shattering transcontinental speed records and announcing the jet age.
From a small wooden barn to the largest exporter in the United States, Boeing's arc mirrors the arc of aviation itself: a rich man's hobby becoming an industry that shrank the planet.
Why it matters: Boeing began the same way so many great companies do — one person, obsessed with a new technology, building the thing himself. The barn is still there to prove it.
Photo: InSapphoWeTrust via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. The photo shows Boeing's original "Red Barn" factory, now part of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the birthplace of the company.
