Boeing at 50

In 1916, Timberman William Edward Boeing, then 34 and already a venturesome millionaire with a yen to get into the aircraft-building industry, founded the corporation that still carries his name. The original capitalization for today's Boeing Co. was $100,000, and the first factory facility was an all-but-abandoned Seattle boatyard.

There, Boeing first built a 3,200-lb., 125-h.p., 78-m.p.h. wood and linen seaplane. In the years thereafter, Boeing made a land-based biplane that was the U.S.'s first efficient airmail carrier; it helped him to win the profitable San Francisco-Chicago route. Boeing's Monomail 200 in 1930 was the first plane with retractable landing gear; his 1933 ten-passenger Boeing 247 was the U.S.'s first twin-engined commercial transport plane, and the Boeing Stratoliner in 1938 was the first transport with a pressurized cabin.

Today, the Boeing Co., under President William M. Allen, employs 125,000 people in 18 countries, last year sold $2 billion worth of products and services. On its books are $3.1 billion worth of orders for everything from helicopters and hydrofoils to the 490-passenger Boeing 747 jet continent hopper, for which Pan Am alone has committed itself to spending another $525 million for deliveries starting in 1969.

The Boeing Co. is still based in Seattle, and last week the city carried on with a golden anniversary celebration for its leading corporate citizen. Among those present was Pan Am's Chairman Juan Trippe, 67, and it was he who perhaps put the Boeing Co. into its best historical perspective. Trippe recalled that as early as 1934 Boeing had drawn up plans for a four-engined bomber; the U.S. War Department turned it down as being too visionary. Boeing thereupon spent $275,000 of its own money to build the plane. During World War II, it became the famed B-17 Flying Fortress--the plane to which, said Trippe, "this republic owes more, perhaps, than any other in the history of aviation."

Again in the postwar era, said Trippe, Boeing spent $16 million of its own money in the development of its 707 jet, which was to revolutionize commercial air travel all over the world. The first flight of the 707 on July 15, 1954, said Trippe, was among "the events which have most dramatically changed the shape of things in our world during my lifetime."

Meanwhile, what ever happened to Founder William Edward Boeing? He was angered by a 1934 U.S. Government decision forcing him to split his aircraft manufacturing company and his newly thriving airmail and passenger service. He therefore let go of the carrier that is now known as United Air Lines, the U.S.'s largest domestic trunk line. He became so embittered that he sold out all his Boeing Co. holdings and never after 1934 played an active part in running his own company. He died in 1956 at the age of 74.

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