What's the Biggest Building on Earth?

To create the biggest-ever airplanes, Boeing created the biggest-ever building. (Before they learned to control the temperature, clouds formed near its ceiling.) Learn more about this mammoth structure in today's episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum here, come with me for just a moment.
Back to the mid nineteen sixties, when airspace giant Boeing
was preparing to build the original Boeing seven forty seven.
It would be the world's first jumbo jet, two and
a half times bigger than the largest existing airliners, The

(00:22):
seven forty seven would revolutionize air transportation by making it
possible to fly more people in cargo at a lower
cost than ever before. But before the seven forty seven
could get off the ground, Boeing and it's then president
and chairman of the board, William M. Allen, needed to
build a facility that was huge enough to accommodate the
construction of the massive plane. Bowing considered building a new

(00:42):
plant in California, but the seven forty seven s head
engineer Joe Sutter reportedly resisted putting the facility that far
away from Boeing's Seattle headquarters, arguing that all that travel
time might slow the project. Instead, the company ended up
picking the site of a former military airport in Everett,
twenty two miles that's thirty five kilometers north of Seattle.
It was a remote area filled with woods that were

(01:04):
home to bears that occasionally had to be shoot away
from the first folks who arrived. Working at breakneck speed,
and a little more than a year, construction workers erected
what was and still is the world's biggest factory. No
report on where the bears went, but we do know
that a railroad spur had to be built to the
site to rush building materials there and holloway debris. It

(01:25):
all cost more than one billion dollars, more than Boeing
was worth at the time, and is considered a feat
of human industry and resourcefulness. More than half a century
after its completion in nineteen sixty seven, Boeing's Everett factory
is still producing planes and inspiring off from the hordes
of visitors who've turned it into a major Washington tourist attraction.

(01:45):
So just how big is the plant? It covers ninety
eight acres and its interior measures at four hundred and
seventy two million cubic feet. That's a little over thirteen
million cubic meters. For perspective, the entire Disneyland theme park
could fit in side with room to spare. It's so
massive than what it was initially built. Accumulation of warm

(02:06):
air and moisture inside actually caused clouds to form just
below the ceiling until equipment was set up to keep
the air circulating. The ceiling is ninety feet that's twenty
seven meters above the factory floor, high enough to fit
an eight story office building. Inside. There are six doors
on the south side of the factory. The four to
the west are eighty two feet high that's about thirty

(02:26):
meters and three hundred feet wide over nine The two
to the east are about the same height but fifty
feet wider that's about fifteen meters. They open at the
push of a button, but it takes about five minutes
for them to do so. Inside the plant has approximately
one million overhead lights and twenty six overhead cranes that
run on thirty nine miles that's sixty three kilometers of

(02:48):
ceiling tracks, which lift and move big pieces and sections
of planes as they're being built. The aircraft are assembled
on a production line that moves about an inch and
a half that's three point eight centimeters per minute. Under
the floor, there's an elaborate two point three three mile
that's three point seven kilometers system of tunnels which contain
the water, sewer, and electrical utilities, and also allow workers

(03:10):
to move around the facility without getting in the way
of the aircraft production. They use one thousand, three hundred
bicycles and tricycles to cover the distances more quickly. The
Everett plant is the equivalent of a small city, with
thirty six thousand workers on site every day. It has
its own fire department, banks, daycare facilities, a fully equipped
medical clinic, and a water treatment plant. One thing that

(03:32):
the Everett Factory doesn't have, though, is air conditioning. If
it starts to get too warm inside, workers open the
factory doors and use fans to draw air inside to
cool the facility. Conversely, if it gets too chilly, they
turn on more of the overhead lights to heat the
air inside. A Seattle's relatively mild climate enables these measures
to work out just fine. The original building was expanded twice,

(03:54):
first in nineteen seventy eight to accommodate production of the
Bowing seven sixty seven, and then again in ninety nine
two for the Boeing seven seventy seven program. Recently, additional
buildings have been added to the factory site to handle,
robotic assembly of the seven seventy seven fuselage and fabrication
of the composite wings of the seven seventy seven X.
The murals on the Factory six massive doors are the

(04:16):
biggest digital graphics on the planet, covering more than a
hundred thousand square feet that's over nine thousand square meters.
Today's episode was written by Patrick Jake Tiger and produced
by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of
other enormous topics with intricate detail, visit our home planet,

(04:36):
how Stuff Works dot com.