A TOUR THAT ENDS WHERE THE COMPANY STARTED

The Freedom Plane, a Boeing 737 that has carried founding-era American documents across the country since the spring, has reached the final stop of its tour. The documents are on display at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle from 30 July to 16 August, closing a journey that has covered eight states in four months. Boeing has marked the occasion by publishing a retrospective feature on the company’s origins in the Puget Sound region, written by Anna Italiano and drawing on the Boeing Archives.

The choice of Seattle as the closing venue carries obvious symmetry. Boeing was founded in the city in 1916 and remains, 110 years later, the largest concentration of its workforce anywhere in the world. Current programmes in the Seattle and Puget Sound region include the 737 MAX, 777, 777X, 767, KC-46 Pegasus, P-8A Poseidon and E-7A Wedgetail, alongside support work for the VC-25B presidential airlift.

FROM A SHIPYARD ON THE DUWAMISH

The company’s origins are more incidental than the scale of its present operations might suggest. In 1910, the year that aviator Charles K. Hamilton made the first aeroplane flight in Washington state, a young timber magnate named Bill Boeing bought Heath Shipyard, a struggling ship-building business on the banks of the Duwamish River in South Seattle. Ed Heath had been building a yacht for Boeing at the time; Boeing acquired the business and its debts. Within six years the shipyard had become the first headquarters of the Boeing Aircraft Company. The building — the Red Barn — remained in use until 1970 and is now part of the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

THE WAR THAT MADE IT AN INDUSTRIAL COMPANY

Boeing identifies the Second World War as the period that transformed it from an engineering firm into a manufacturing enterprise, and reshaped the Puget Sound region with it. The Model 299 prototype, developed at Plant I in Seattle, became the B-17 Flying Fortress after a development programme that included the loss of both the prototype and Boeing test pilot Les Tower during trials at Wright Field in Ohio. Just under 13,000 B-17s were eventually built — by Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed jointly — with nearly half assembled at Plant II in Seattle, a facility constructed in 1936 specifically to enable mass production. By 1944 Boeing’s Seattle facilities employed nearly 50,000 people, a large proportion of them women.

The demographic effect on surrounding communities was pronounced. Renton, twelve miles south of downtown Seattle and formerly a coal mining town of fewer than 5,000 people, quadrupled in population between 1940 and 1945 after Boeing arrived in 1941 to build the B-29 Superfortress. The Renton Highlands neighbourhood, built rapidly to house incoming workers and initially conceived as temporary, remains a permanent part of the city. Of 3,970 B-29s produced, approximately 44% were built at Boeing Wichita. Plant II was demolished in 2011 as part of Boeing’s habitat restoration commitments around the Lower Duwamish Waterway, having previously produced the B-17, 307 Stratoliner, B-29, B-50, 377 Stratocruiser, B-47 and B-52.

A LETTER FROM GERMANY AND THE SHAPE OF EVERY JETLINER SINCE

The single most consequential technical development in the company’s history may have arrived by post. On a trip to Germany in 1945, Boeing Chief Aerodynamicist George Schairer encountered swept-back wing technology and wrote to colleagues in Seattle instructing them to apply it to the new jet bomber prototype then in development. The resulting XB-47 rolled out in Seattle on 12 September 1947. As the world’s first large swept-wing aircraft, the B-47 Stratojet combined a 35-degree wing sweep with pod-mounted engines beneath the wing — a configuration that improved speed, safety and structural weight and which remains the standard architecture of every modern jetliner. Schairer’s letter is held at the Museum of Flight.

That architecture carried directly into commercial aviation. In the 1950s Boeing chief executive Bill Allen committed the company to building a commercial jetliner prototype with no orders in hand. The 367-80, known as the Dash-80, rolled out of the Renton plant on 14 May 1954. Pan American placed twenty orders in 1955 for what became the 707, and the first aircraft rolled out on 28 October 1957. The 727, 737 and 757 followed from Renton, earning the plant the name Jet City. The 737 itself began at Boeing’s Thompson Site in Tukwila in 1967, five miles from the Red Barn, with production moving to Renton in 1970 — where the current generation is still built today.

Bill Boeing retired from the company in 1934 and attended the Dash-80 rollout twenty years later. He died in 1956, having lived to see the company he founded usher in the jet age. Boeing today operates in more than 65 countries.