William Boeing built his first plane because spare parts were months away
A timber baron named William Boeing bought a seaplane from Glenn Martin, and his test pilot soon damaged it. Martin said replacement parts would take months. Boeing told his friend, a Navy commander named George Conrad Westervelt, that they could build a better plane themselves, and faster. Their seaplane flew in June 1916.
Boeing came to aviation with money already made. Born in Detroit in 1881 to a German mining engineer who grew rich from Minnesota timber and iron ore, he was schooled partly in Switzerland, dropped out of Yale in 1903 and moved to Washington state. There he bought timberland around Grays Harbor and prospered in a national building boom, partly by shipping lumber east through the new Panama Canal.
Flight caught him at a Seattle exhibition in 1909, where he saw a piloted aircraft for the first time. At an air meet the next year he asked pilot after pilot for a ride and was refused by all except the French aviator Louis Paulhan, who then finished the event and left without ever taking him up. So Boeing took lessons at Martin's school in Los Angeles and bought the plane that would soon need repairs.
The partners set up shop in an old boatyard on the Duwamish River. When America entered the First World War in April 1917, the firm became the Boeing Airplane Company and won a Navy order for 50 planes. Afterwards it turned to airmail, and on March 3, 1919, Boeing and Eddie Hubbard flew 60 letters from Vancouver to Seattle's Lake Union, the first international airmail delivered to the United States. A decade later he joined Pratt and Whitney's Frederick Rentschler to form a giant holding company spanning manufacturing and airlines, including what became United Air Lines.
It did not last. In 1934 the government accused him of monopoly, and new airmail law forced the group to split manufacturing from flying. Boeing sold out, turned to horse breeding and property, and placed racial covenants barring non-white buyers on land he subdivided north of Seattle. He died in 1956, and the company carrying his name grew into America's largest exporter by value.
Source: William E. Boeing
