William E. Boeing

William Edward Boeing (; October 1, 1881 – September 28, 1956) was an American aviation pioneer who founded the Pacific Airplane Company in 1916, which a year later was renamed to The Boeing Company, now the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value and among the largest aerospace manufacturers in the world. William Boeing's first design was the Boeing Model 1 (or B & W Seaplane), which first flew in June 1916, a month before the company was founded. He also helped create the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation (known as "United Airlines" today) in 1929 and served as its chairman. He received the Daniel Guggenheim Medal in 1934 and was posthumously inducted in to the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966, ten years after his death.

Early life

William Boeing was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Marie M. Ortmann, from Vienna, Austria, and Wilhelm Böing (1846–1890) from Hohenlimburg, Germany. Wilhelm Böing emigrated to the United States in 1868 and initially worked as a laborer. His move to America was disliked by his father and he received no financial support. He later made a fortune from North Woods timber lands and iron ore mineral rights on the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, north of Lake Superior.

In 1890, when William was eight, his father died of influenza and his mother soon remarried. He attended school in Vevey, Switzerland, and returned to the US for a year of prep school in Boston. He enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, dropping out in 1903 to go into the lumber business.

Career

Boeing moved to Hoquiam, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest. He was successful in the venture, in part by shipping lumber to the East Coast via the then-new Panama Canal, generating funds that he would later apply to a very different business.The Panama Canal's unexpected winners
BBC Mundo, July 4, 2016

While president of Greenwood Timber Company, Boeing, who had experimented with boat design, traveled to Seattle. During the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, he saw a manned flying machine for the first time and became fascinated with aircraft. In 1910, at the Dominguez Flying Meet, Boeing asked every pilot foreign and domestic if he could go for an airplane ride and was repeatedly denied except for French aviator Louis Paulhan. Boeing waited and Paulhan finished the meet and left never giving Boeing his ride. Boeing took flying lessons at Glenn L. Martin Flying School in Los Angeles and purchased one of Martin's planes.Schefke, Brian
"William Edward Boeing."
In ''Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present'', vol. 4, edited by Jeffrey Fear. German Historical Institute. Last modified June 3, 2016. Martin pilot James Floyd Smith traveled to Seattle to assemble Boeing's new Martin TA hydroaeroplane and continue to teach its owner to fly. Huge crates arrived by train and Smith assembled the plane in a tent hangar erected on the shore of Lake Union. Boeing's test pilot, Herb Munter, soon damaged the plane. When he was told by Martin that replacement parts would not be available for months, Boeing told his friend, Commander George Conrad Westervelt of the US Navy, "We could build a better plane ourselves and build it faster." Westervelt agreed. They soon built and flew the B & W Seaplane, an amphibian biplane that had outstanding performance. Boeing decided to go into the aircraft business, using an old boat works on the Duwamish River