Rather than the Boeing corporate story, this is the story of William E. Boeing, the man. The author, David Williams, became friends with Bill Boeing Jr., who was a great source of stories about his father. The Boeing family also has a significant archive that they opened, and which has never been opened previously to a journalist.
The author is the head of the Hydroplane & Raceboat Museum in Kent and has written several books about hydroplane history. For some reason, I was expecting a rather amateur effort and was pleasantly surprised. It is well written, very interesting, and a reasonable length at 260 pages.
I’ve lived in Seattle all my life, growing up on Beacon Hill, very close to Boeing Field and Plant 2. But I realized I knew little of the early history of the Boeing Company and almost nothing about William E. Boeing, the company’s founder.
Boeing is an anglicized spelling of the family’s German name, Böing. The family’s wealth goes back generations in the Prussian province of Westphalia, in the town of Hohenlimburg. Wilhelm Böing emigrated to Michigan in 1868. Wilhelm married an American in in 1880, when he was 34. The first born was William Edward Boeing, who they called Bill.
Wilhelm learned the timber business from his father-in-law. He also inherited a fortune from his mother. He moved to Detroit and had a large house built and staffed it with servants. On a trip to the West Coast in 1887, Wilhelm fell in love with the country and saw the potential of all the forests. He started buying timber lands. But in 1890, Wilhelm died, leaving an estate of $4 million.
His son, Bill Boeing, was sent off to boarding school in Switzerland. While in Switzerland, Bill took a ride on a hydrogen balloon at a fair. At the age of 14, Bill had found his purpose.
Bill returned to Detroit and his family. For college, he was off to Yale. But he became disillusioned and left before graduating.
In 1903, Bill headed to the West Coast to visit the 25,000 acres of timberland his father had left him in Grays Harbor. He was soon in the lumber business.
Of course, 1903 was the year that the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
In 1906, San Francisco suffered a great earthquake, which led to fires consuming the city. Rebuilding required lumber, which Boeing was suited to supplying through the port of Grays Harbor.
In 1907, Boeing traveled to Seattle, met Joshua Green, and was convinced to move to Seattle. Seattle had the best of hardscrabble Hoquiam, but also offered bits of the Gilded Age high society that Bill was accustomed to. Boeing was one of the wealthiest young men in Seattle. But he and others from the East Coast were used to having servants to prepare food and keep house. They formed the University Club to fill the gap.
In 1910, aviation was starting to take off (pun intended), and Bill had been interested since his childhood balloon flight. Boeing commissioned a 94-foot yacht. When the boat builder ran into financial problems, Boeing bought the company, which later became the original airplane plant, the Red Barn
In 1914, Boeing got his first aeroplane ride from a barnstormer, taking off from Lake Union. And while the U.S. stated it was neutral in the world war, Boeing felt that the country would be dragged into the war. The Preparedness movement was meant to get the country ready for when that time came.
Boeing formed the Pacific Aero Products Company to make flight-related products, including airplanes. At the Oxbow Plant, in South Seattle, he started building airplanes and learned to fly.
The company relied on aerodynamic consulting with a professor at MIT. But that was too slow. Boeing came up with the idea of founding an aviation department at the UW. He talked to Henry Suzzallo, president of the university about the idea. Eventually, Boeing donated $6,000 to build a wind tunnel. The UW was only the second university in the U.S. to have its own wind tunnel. (I think it is still used.)
The Preparedness movement was correct. The U.S. got dragged into the war and Boeing airplanes played a major part.
After the war, Boeing tried to get airmail established as a business. It didn’t work at first, but eventually it did. The difference was when the postal service changed from running their own planes to contracting with private carriers. The contracts were enough to support the beginnings of air travel. Besides carrying the mail, a limited number of passengers were also accommodated in the same planes.
The mail and passenger business stood up well despite the Great Depression. But the coming of Franklin Roosevelt was another thing. His aggressive anti-business approach got rid of the USPS contracts with private companies, and replaced them with the Army flying the mail. The results were over 60 crashes and hundreds of lives lost.
Eventually, the government went back to having private contractors fly the mail. But they couldn’t be affiliated with any company in another aviation business, such as manufacturing. This led to the splitting of the Boeing Company into three separate companies.
The U.S. military began a huge build up for a potential involvement in the second World War. The attack on Pearl Harbor, of course, changed the potential to an almost immediate declaration of war. Bill Boeing had retired from the Boeing Company in 1934, after his mistreatment by the Roosevelt administration.
His patriotism brought him back to Boeing for the enormous buildup for the war. Boeing was no longer a shareholder and never received a salary during this period. But he worked on the technical and production issues of the new planes and the factories to build them, for the duration of the war. The bombers built in Boeing plants had a huge part in Europe and the Pacific theaters of the war. It was a Boeing plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan.
After the war, Bill Boeing retired to his ranch east of Seattle, and his yacht, Taconite. He died of a heart attack on Taconite in 1956.
I really enjoyed this book. There is a lot more to the story. I recommend this book to you.
No comments yet.