Business & brands
William Boeing
1881–1956 · aviation pioneer, industrialist
Founder of the Boeing airplane company, born in Detroit to a German immigrant who had grown rich from Great Lakes timber and iron ore.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
Puget Sound, Washington
aged 74- Birth name
- William Edward Böing
- Also known as
- Bill Boeing · William E. Boeing
- Detroit years
- 1881–1890
- Field
- Business & brands
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
William Böing was born in Detroit in 1881. His father, Wilhelm Böing, had arrived from Germany in 1868 as a laborer and made a fortune from North Woods timberland and iron-ore rights on Minnesota's Mesabi Range. When William was eight, in 1890, his father died of influenza, and his mother soon took the children to Europe, where he went to school in Vevey, Switzerland. He later studied engineering at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School but left in 1903 for the lumber business in Washington State. In Seattle he took up flying, and in 1916 he built his first seaplane with George Conrad Westervelt and founded the aircraft company that took the Boeing name a year later. By the late 1920s his holding company also ran airlines, the forerunner of United Airlines, until antitrust rules broke it up in 1934.
Highlights
- Founded the Pacific Airplane Company in 1916, renamed Boeing in 1917
- First design: the Boeing Model 1 (B & W) seaplane, flown in June 1916
- Daniel Guggenheim Medal, 1934
- Inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, 1966
- Born in Detroit, 1881; lived here until his father's death in 1890