Boeing and the Aerospace State

On June fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, a timber merchant named William Boeing watched the first flight of a seaplane he had helped design, the B and W, lifting off Lake Union in Seattle, and immediately decided to turn that ambition into a company. Thirty days later, on July fifteenth, he incorporated the Pacific Aero Products Company. He had a boathouse, a handful of skilled craftsmen, and the commercial instinct of a man who had gotten rich reading the grain of wood.

Boeing renamed his company the Boeing Airplane Company in April of nineteen seventeen, just in time for the United States to enter the First World War. The Navy ordered fifty training seaplanes. A business was underway.

What followed over the next century is inseparable from the history of Washington State. Boeing built the B-seventeen Flying Fortress at its Seattle plant during the Second World War, and together with Douglas and Lockheed-Vega under license, produced nearly thirteen thousand of the heavy bombers that flew over Europe. The postwar jet age made Seattle the aerospace capital of the nation. The seven oh seven, first flown in nineteen fifty-seven, made long-haul commercial air travel economically viable. The seven forty-seven, the jumbo jet, flew for the first time in February of nineteen sixty-nine, and it changed the geometry of the world, making international travel affordable for a generation that had never imagined flying across an ocean.

At its peak, Boeing employed more than one hundred thousand people in Washington State. The fortunes of the state's economy rose and fell with Boeing's production cycles. When orders dropped, bumper stickers appeared in Seattle asking the last person leaving to please turn out the lights.

Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago in two thousand one. The planes are still built here.