Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works and I love
all things tech. And as I record this, there is
an ongoing story in tech and aviation news. You've probably
(00:29):
heard about it that's focusing on the troubles with Boeing's
seven thirty seven Max aircraft. So far, it's resulted in
two fatal accidents in less than half a year, which
led to the entire fleet of seven thirty seven Max
aircraft being grounded across the world, while lots of people
are looking into it and figuring out how to fix
(00:51):
things and how to prevent such tragedies from happening in
the future. Now, in a subsequent episode, I'll look into
that specific problem more closely, because obviously it is very important.
A lot of people lost their lives in those tragedies.
But today we're going to look at the history, the
origins of Boeing and the role that the company has
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played in technology over the years, not just in commercial jets,
but also military technology like helicopters and bombers and things
like that, and missiles as well as even components for
space vehicles. And the company is more than a century
old at this point. So how did it all get started? Well,
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we should probably begin by focusing on the founder of
the company itself, William E. Boeing. William E. Bowing was
born in eighteen eighty one in Detroit, Michigan, and his
is not a rags to riches story. It's more like
a riches to holy cow. That's a lot of money
(01:55):
riches story. His father was Wilhelm Boeing. Uh that spelling
of Boeing is slightly different from the modern spelling. Modern
spelling is b o e i n g the Anglicized
spelling of Boeing, but originally it was b oh with
an oombl out i n g. So. Hillhelm Boeing immigrated
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from Europe to the United States in eighteen sixty eight.
Wilhelm himself was from a well to do family, though
he did not have a fortune to his name upon
arriving in the US. He had a lot of connections
which helped him out. But he didn't exactly come over
to the States with pockets full of cash. He had
to make his own fortune. He would meet a man
(02:39):
named carte Ortmann, who essentially helped Wilhelm get into the
lumber trade, where he would flourish and he amassed a fortune.
He also got into mining during his own lifetime. The
mining operations that he created weren't terribly um profitable, but
they would prove to be so in the long run.
(03:01):
It was just unfortunately after he had already passed away.
He also eventually married uh cart Portman's daughter, Marie, and
they had three kids, including William E. Boeing Uh. He
was born into wealth as a result, and Wilhelm would
die in eight nine. He contracted influence. He actually died
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on a train ride back home. William Boeing was only
eight years old at that time. His mother remarried and
he was sent off to attend a prestigious boarding school
in Switzerland. So talk about a life that I can't
really identify with at all. He would return to the States.
He attended other rather exclusive prep schools before he would
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eventually enter Yale University, and he decided to study engineering.
Now at the time, the engineering program at Yale was
a three year program, but Boeing wanted to pursue his
own fortune a little earlier than that, and so he
draw out of university after just two years. He then
decided to move to the Pacific Northwest and following his
(04:07):
father's footsteps and get into the lumber trade. At this point,
the Michigan area was pretty heavily deforested. I mean there's
still had plenty of forests, but the lumber industry had
really operated for quite some time there, so he decided
the Pacific Northwest was the next prime real estate for
the lumber industry. Boeing's company, the Greenwood Timber Company, proved
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to be very successful, and by now it was the
early nineteen hundreds. Around nineteen ten, William E. Boeing would
attend an air show near Los Angeles, California, and he
got a look at early airplanes. Now keep in mind
this is nineteen ten. The Right brothers had their successful
flights just in nineteen o three, so very early days
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for aviation. William Boeing was immediately interested in airplanes and aviation,
and he even tried to arrange for a ride in
an airplane, but found that none of the pilots were
particularly willing to provide one, and so it would go
until about nineteen fourteen. That's when William Boeing met another
person named George Conrad Westerveldt. He was an officer in
(05:15):
the U. S. Navy who also had a fascination with
aircraft and had been stationed over on the West Coast.
The two men became close friends. They shared a lot
of common interests together, and in nineteen fifteen they met
an aviator named Terra Mahoney and he was happy to
have them aboard his Curtis seaplane and he gave them
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some flights around and that just cemented their interest in aviation.
Boeing decided to officially enroll in flight school in nineteen
fifteen in Los Angeles, California. He completed his training, and
then he decided to, you know, treat himself the only
the way that that multi millionaire types can. He bought
(05:59):
his own airplane. There was a model t a seaplane,
and essentially this was a type of training aircraft. To
be fair, there weren't a whole lot of different varieties
in nineteen fifteen. There's still very early days for aircraft.
He did not exactly fall in love with this airplane
as soon as he purchased the aircraft, he had to
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pay for a replacement pontoon. This seaplane had a single
pontoon upon which it would land, as opposed to the
dual pontoons you often see with seaplanes. He hired on
a crew to maintain the plane, but he didn't own
it for very long before it had an accident and
got partially wrecked. In the fall of nineteen fifteen, it
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crashed into Lake Washington. Boeing was not aboard the plane
at the time, so he wasn't piloting the aircraft or anything,
so he was not injured in this, but the aircraft
itself was damaged, and Boeing was just largely unimpressed with
the performance of the aircraft. He became convinced he could
help design a superior airplane. Now, around that same time,
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there were more than a dozen fledgling companies that were
trying to design and build aircraft, but I don't mean
to suggest there were a lot of actual aircraft being
produced as a result. In fact, in nineteen fourteen, there
were fewer than fifty planes manufactured by all of these
companies put together, and at this point there were no
(07:27):
real practical applications for planes, so there wasn't much call
for making more of them. They were mostly seen as
playthings for wealthy hobbyists who were otherwise pretty bored with life.
So if you had a lot of money and you
didn't have a whole lot of concern for your own
personal safety, you might try to start building aircraft or
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buying one. So a lot of those companies were founded
by people who weren't that different from William Boeing himself.
Though at least Boeing had had some engineering training under
his belt, some of the people who founded some of
these early airplane companies didn't even have that. Boeing reached
out to Westervelt to help him with the design, and
they also hired on a mechanic and pilot named Herb
(08:11):
Munter as well. Westervelt secured time with a wind tunnel
that was operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or
m i T, and they tested their various designs. They
would bring wooden models to test in the wind tunnels
and take very careful measurements of how well those designs
were doing. These were not full scale replicas, but you know,
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small scale wooden ones. Ultimately, Westerveldt designed a plane that
didn't look that much different from the Model T A
C plane that Boeing had purchased in the past. There
were some important differences, So the Model T A had
that single pontoon on it, but the new aircraft would
actually have two pontoons to help with stability. But in
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many other ways, it was a fairly close copy of
that T A airplane. They called this first plane that
they built the Blue Bill, and they put it through
a test flight on June fift nineteen sixteen. It was
a success. It actually did very well on that test flight,
and it would become the basis for the company's first aircraft,
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which became known as the BMW Model one B and
W stood for Boeing and Westerveldt. Of course. One month
after that test flight, on July nineteen sixteen, William Boeing
filed articles of incorporation for a new company called the
Pacific Aero Products Company. Those articles of incorporation were rather vague,
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no telling if it was purposeful or not, but it
would end up being a huge help to the company
a little later on. I'll explain more in a bit,
but this is the company that would ultimately become bowing
and why Boeing The company traces their history back to
nineteen sixteen. Officially, the company would change its name a
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little less than a year after it had formed, and
it became the Boeing Airplane Company in May nineteen seventeen.
But we've got a little bit more to talk about
before we get to nineteen seventeen. So Westerveldt would not
stay on. He couldn't. He was actually transferred back to
the East Coast. So he had this sort of end
his official business relationship with Boeing. However, he would remain
(10:29):
important to the company. He would refer talent from the
East Coast to go and work for his friends company
out west, and one of those referrals was a man
named Wong Sue, who would become known as the first
actual engineer on Boeing's staff, and some would even call
him the father of Boeing because of his influence in
(10:51):
those early early days. So Wang Sue was born in Beijing, China,
in eighteen ninety three. When he was only twelve years old,
the Manchu government would select him to become a navy
cadet at the Young Thai Naval Academy. When he was sixteen,
the government sent him to study naval architecture and engineering
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in England at Armstrong Technical College. Then he had the
opportunity to attend m I T and study their brand
new courses in aeronautical engineering. It was the first of
such programs in the United States. He expressed a desire
to stay in the US for a couple of years
beyond his graduation in order to get some practical experience
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designing and building aircraft before returning to China. When Westervelt
was looking for someone to send over to Boeing, Wong's
instructor at m I T, the guy who actually created
this aeronautical engineering UH program at M I T, a
guy named Jerome Huntsucker amediately said that Wong was the
right candidate. He would play an important part in Boeing's
(12:00):
early successes. So the original Boeing factory back west was
a boat house that wasn't too far from Seattle, Washington
on the Duomish River. And by the way, I'm sure
I'm mispronouncing and butchering names, and I will continue to
do so throughout this episode, and my deepest apologies for that.
(12:20):
That is a failing on my part. Well, William Boeing
had some interesting ideas about creating incentives for employees his engineers.
He said, well, you know what if you are designing
a plane, if you're building a plane, you also can
fly it. You're allowed to fly the planes that you're building.
So they weren't just the engineers and manufacturers, they were
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the test pilots as well, and Wong would get to
construct planes for Boeing and get to fly them if
you wanted to the first plane, Wong would have a
hand in designing, and really the main one was the
Model C, which was ready for its first test flight
on uh November five, nineteen sixteen, which was just a
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few months after the BMW test flights. So one thing
that really struck me as I was doing research for
this episode was how close together some of these dates are. Like,
it's amazing to me. The thought of putting together a
prototype aircraft and then flying it, and then going right
into the design and production of a different prototype aircraft
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right away and being able to do it within a month.
It's phenomenal to me. Now. Granted, in these days these
aircraft were made out of canvas and wood, that would
be a while before they would switch over to metals
like aluminum. But still, and you know, they were also
in lumber country up in the Pacific Northwest. They had
no shortage of that, and and of course Boeing himself
operated a lumber uh company, so that helped as well.
(13:50):
But still, it's pretty amazing to me. Anyway, the BMW
had showed that Boeing could make a working aircraft, but
it had very little application outside of that wealthy obbyist market, which,
as you might imagine, was a pretty limited slice of
the population. The Model C would prove to be much
more versatile, and it was helped in no small part
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by the fact that over in Europe the Great War
what we would later call World War One, was raging
and it was only a matter of time before the
United States was pulled into it. So the aircraft that
flew on November five, nineteen sixteen was called d C four,
and that was because it was the fourth airplane that
William Boeing ever owned, and Wong would redesign the Model C,
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giving it a bigger rudder, among other changes, and this
redesign Model C was ready by April nineteen seventeen. That
was the same month that President Woodrow Wilson would declare
war on Germany, putting the United States into World War One.
As for Wong, he received the princely sum of fifty
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dollars and seventy seven cents for his work as an
engineer and then was released from Boeing the company, that is,
on May twenty, nineteen seventeen. He returned to China and
he established the first Chinese airplane factory there. So, while
we're talking about money, this fifty dollars and seventy seven
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cents that Wong earned for all his work with the
Boeing Company, let's talk a little bit about how much
the Boeing Company earned from a contract they made with
the United States Navy during World War One. The Navy
wanted proof that the Model C would meet its needs,
and they asked for a demonstration at a naval base
in Pensacola, Florida. Now, for those of you not familiar
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with US geography, Pensacola, Florida is pretty darn far away
from Seattle, Washington. The two locations are on opposite sides
of the country. Seattle, Washington's in the northwest, Pensacola, Florida's
in the southeast. And the United States is really wide. Well.
This presented something of a challenge because the Mode SEE
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aircraft had a fairly short range of flight. These early
airplanes could not go that far, so in order to
get to this demonstration, Boeing actually had to pack a
couple of planes up in pieces disassembled on a train
an urban munter. The mechanic and pilot I mentioned a
little bit Ago, as well as a factory superintendent named
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Claude Berlin, would travel with these disassembled planes across the
country on train, arriving at Pensacola and then assembling them
again so that they could be flown on behalf of
the Navy so that they could evaluate the aircraft. Now.
The flight test was a huge success, and the Navy
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put in an order for fifty Model c's. The price
tag for those fifty planes was five hundred seventy five
thousand dollars, so quite a bit more cheddar than Mr
Wong had earned. The Boeing company would build a new
manufacturing facility near Seattle nicknamed the Red Barn, and the
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Navy would also order a couple of other special aircraft
on top of these fifty Model cs. They wanted a
couple of modified models c's sometimes referred to as E
A s of e A standing for experimental aircraft, and
these were land planes. They were meant to land on
firm ground rather than on water. They also asked for
another variant called the C one F, which had a
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single main pontoon as opposed to the pair of pontoons,
as well as a couple of auxiliary floats to add stability.
And that was the beginning of some pretty lush days
for Boeing. But when we come back, I'll talk about
another industry that opened up real opportunities for Boeing beyond
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the military. But first let's take a quick break. You know,
it's got to be pretty weird to have a business
really take off, because whatever it is that you happen
to be making is really important for war efforts, because
your profitability is dependent upon violent struggles in which millions
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of lives are potentially at stake. And moreover, it creates
an odd situation which you might on some level wish
for continued hostilities because that means you stay in business.
It's pretty dark. In fact, the Boeing Airplane Company was
almost completely dependent upon military contracts. In addition, to the
model C aircraft they were making for the Navy. They
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also secured a contract to build another company's aircraft. This
would be the Curtis H S two L from the
Curtis Aeroplane Company. The Navy would use these types of
aircraft on anti submarine patrols off the coast of France,
and the Navy anticipated a greater need than what Curtis
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could produce in its own manufacturing facilities, so Boeing landed
what would have been a pretty lucrative contract to create
licensed versions of the same aircraft. So Bowing didn't design
this aircraft. They were working from a Curtis design uh
and they would get a certain amount of money for
producing these aircraft. However, before Boeing could really get moving
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on this production, World War One came to an end
and the Navy canceled the order for those HS two
L planes. At that point, Boeing employed three seven people,
but the contract with the military was seen as a
really pivotal contract for the company's survival. It was important
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because there weren't really any other streams of revenue coming
in that were reliable. So William Bowing first loaned some
of his own money to the Boeing Company for the
purposes of meeting payroll, because they weren't bringing in enough
revenue to pay everybody. Even so, the demand for aircraft
plummeted once the war was over, and Boeing had little
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choice but to scale back the airplane company. They reduced
it down to sixty seven employees by nineteen nineteen. But
Boeing had another application for aircraft early on that wasn't
dependent upon military actions, and it wasn't commercial flights either,
because those were still several years away. Instead, it was
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delivering the mail, or at least the potential for that.
On March third, nine, nineteen, William Boeing himself co piloted
a plane that was designated the Sea seven hundred, so
another variant of the Model C. It was to carry
mail from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to Seattle, Washington, and
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technically it was the first international airmail delivery to the
United States. I think it was something like sixty letters
or packages, so it wasn't a whole lot, and it
wasn't exactly a total success. Boeing and his co pilot,
a guy named Eddie Hubbard, were forced to land prematurely.
They landed about twenty five miles north of Seattle, because
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again these aircraft weren't really capable of taking very long
flights and they were running very low on fuel. But
it was a sort of proof of concept for air
delivery and would help establish the practice in earnest. Later on,
the Post Office would take full control of that for
quite a few years. Now, there was a real danger
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of Boeing going out of business in these early years.
Not only did the contracts with the military dry up,
but the country was also entering into an economic depression.
This wasn't the Great depression that would come on a
little bit later, but it was an economic depression and
there was very little call for aircraft. So to keep
the factories in operation, the company began to produce other stuff.
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This was partly possible because, as I mentioned earlier, when
William Boeing was first incorporating his business, his articles of
incorporation were pretty darned vague, So his company was allowed
to make lots of different stuff, and he dedicated factories
to build whatever was in demand, like furniture, So you
could have ended up with a dining table created by
(22:07):
aeronautical engineers possibly. The company also had a contract to
provide maintenance and service to military aircraft, which helped a little,
and Boeing would land another big military contract. This time,
the agreement involved the design and construction of twenty g
A one and twenty g A two bombers. Now, these
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were also aircraft that weren't designed by Bowing. These were
designed by the New Army Air Service, and Boeing would
just act as the producer of those aircraft. The manufacturer
of those aircraft. The company got to work, but the
Army canceled the contract after ten g A one bombers
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and three g A two bombers were complete. However, the
Army also chose Boeing to build two hundred MB three aircraft,
and the NB three were fighter planes, also not designed
by Boeing. They were created by a different company called
Thomas Morse. So why did Boeing end up with the
contract to build this other company's planes. It's because William
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Boeing was incredibly aggressive when bidding for contracts, and Boeing
came in with the lowest bid at one point four
million dollars for two d aircraft, and so the government said,
you win, you get to build them. Meanwhile, there was
still a need to find civilian uses for airplanes. Eddie
Hubbard would convince William Bowing to make a sincere push
for air carrier operations, so airmail. Essentially, those were the
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guys who had made history back in with what had
been at the time mostly a proof of concept airmail run,
but Hubbard felt that it was a possible legitimate avenue
and a source for revenue for the company outside of
military contracts. At the time, the United States Post Office
was operating all of its own aircraft for air mail delivery.
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The aircraft in question was a clunky beast called the
d H four, and it wasn't a particularly agile for
more importantly safe aircraft. The Post Office initially hired forty
pilots to deliver airmail by and this is a sobering fact,
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thirty one of those forty pilots had died in plane crashes.
So the Post Office sought for a new, more reliable,
and more maneuverable plane to take over the job of
the d H four, which obviously was not not performing
up to standards. It was far too dangerous. Boeing proposed
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a new design. They called it the Model forty A.
One of the most important components of this particular aircraft
was that it would use a totally different kind of
engine from previous aircraft. So engines can get really hot
and airplane engines like the d H four relied on
water cooling, but that meant the airplane would have to
(25:03):
carry a tank of water in addition to everything else
in order to keep the engine cool. Water is heavy,
and the slashing of water can make it hard to
fly a plane steady. The Model forty A instead had
an air cooled engine designed by a company called Pratt
and Whitney, which was essentially part of the Boeing family.
As the name implies, these engines manage heat by dissipating
(25:26):
it into the air, typically through a finned surface. The
finned surface increases surface area and thus increases air cooling efficiency.
In addition to the opportunity to build air mail aircraft,
Boeing also had the chance to bid for actual airmail
routes see the Post Office. Would open up this possibility
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because the US government passed a piece of legislation called
the Contract air Mail Act, and that did pretty much
what the name suggests. It gave private come and E's
the opportunity to bid on airmail routes on a contract basis,
and there were lots of different private companies that could
do this. There are a lot of companies that were
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operating very small regional aircraft services. So Hubbard would convince
Boeing to go after one of these routes, this being
a big one between San Francisco and Chicago. Boeing once
again got really aggressive with his bidding for that particular contract.
In fact, his bidding was almost too aggressive. The Post
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Office very nearly disregarded Boeing's bid because they considered it
too low to actually be serious. It was much much
lower than the main competitor for that contract, that was
a company called Western air Express. Bowing used his political
connections to reach out to Wesley Jones, who was a
Senator from Washington State, in order for Jones to reach
(26:55):
out to the Postmaster General and reassure the Postmaster General
that Bowing, both the man and the company was serious
and that the company was completely capable of doing the
job at the quoted price. Even so, Boeing was compelled
to put his money where his mouth is. He had
to post an eight hundred thousand dollar bond to guarantee
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his company would actually live up to its contractual obligations.
I guess you got to spend money to make money
with the ink drying on that contract. Boeing also reached
out to Pratt and Whitney with an order of twenty
five of those air cooled engines, and William Boeing would
form a subsidiary company called Boeing Air Transport. It officially
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went into business on July one, nineteen twenty seven. The
contract would give Boeing the stability it needed to continue
to grow. In addition, Charles Lindbergh made history by flying
across the Atlantic Ocean in nineteen twenty seven, which prompted
renewed interest in aviation, and the stock market was performing
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well right at that time, so bowing the company went
public in n in an effort to raise more money
through a stock offering that also began to offer out
the opportunity for passengers to fly on aircraft. Now, this
was not exactly luxury travel, nor was it a big
commercial jet or anything along those lines. Boeing altered a
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few of its Model forty A aircraft, the ones that
were being used for airmail, and these altered aircraft had
two whole extra seats in them, so you had the
pilot and co pilot seats, and then you had two
passenger seats, so passengers could book one of two seats
and travel with all the airmail to a specific route.
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Air travel for passengers was in its infancy and Boeing
was a dominant player in that space. It was a
small space, but Bowing had carved out a pretty significant
portion of that pie. Uh The estimate was that Boeing
was handling about of all passenger and airmail travel in
the United States at this time, and William Boeing wanted
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to bring his subsidiaries altogether and unify them under a
single holding company. And this was in an effort to
remain competitive against other growing companies, and it led to
the foundation of what was called the United Aircraft and
Transport Corporation, which was formed in nineteen twenty nine. It
was essentially an umbrella company for the new Boeing air
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Transport Company, the older Boeing Airplane company, Pratt and Whitney,
that engine manufacturing company I talked about a second ago,
and some other smaller companies that Boeing had kind of
acquired along the way. In nineteen thirty the United States
Congress passed the air Mail Act in an effort to
improve air mail service across the United States and to
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encourage the development of commercial air travel for passengers. As
part of that strategy, companies like Boeing would be allowed
to make use of the infrastructure that the United States
Post Office had established when it first built out airmail routes,
so all those air travel booy's and things of that
nature these companies were allowed to use. The Postmaster General,
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a guy named Walter Brown, thought the best way to
improve airmail service was to rely almost exclusively on larger
air carrier companies, and he put criteria in place that
only the big companies could actually meet, and it ended
up pushing out a lot of smaller, independent companies that
had been doing these routes up to that point. And
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more importantly, some of those smaller companies had been doing
this at more competitive bids than the bigger companies. So
a reporter investigated this matter in nineteen thirty three and
discovered that the Postmaster General had met with a few
select large companies like Boeing's parent company, and essentially divvied
(30:55):
up the nation's airmail routes between a select few big companies,
leaving out these smaller ones, even the smaller ones that
were posting more competitive bids. This prompted a full on
investigation into the matter by Congress, and ultimately the investigation
found that Brown technically didn't do anything against the laws,
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so the Postmaster General didn't technically do anything illegal, but
it seemed like it was unethical, and so Congress ended
up putting pressure on the airplane companies as well as
on President Franklin Roosevelt to make something happen to change things.
So Roosevelt initially ordered that all air mail service should
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fall exclusively under the auspices of the Army Air Corps
in ntour, and that the Army Air Corps was to
take over immediately and provide that service, which ended up
being a disaster. Twelve pilots would die in crashes within
the first two months of this change, which of course
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prompted the President to reverse this decision and flip it
back so that private companies would provide airmail service. However,
Hugo Black, who was the the politician who had actually
overseen the congressional investigation into the whole mess earlier would
offer a new piece of legislation called the Airmail Act
of nineteen thirty four, and that prohibited companies from operating
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as both an airplane manufacturer and an airmail carrier. You
could do one or the other, but you couldn't do both.
You could not be both an airmail carrier and build airplanes.
And the big companies that have been part of the
cozy relationship a couple of years earlier were expressly forbidden
from getting airmail contracts. So those same big companies that
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the Postmaster General had met with in just a you know,
a few years earlier, were they were out of luck.
So in response, United Aircraft and Transport would break apart
into three separate companies. There were two manufacturing companies. There's
the Boeing Airplane Company that's the one we're gonna stick with,
that's still bowing that oversaw manufacturing operations west of the Mississippi.
(33:07):
There was United Aircraft that was a manufacturing company that
had its factories east of the Mississippi. And then you
had a third company that would actually act as an
air transportation company for cargo and for passengers that would
become United Airlines. So I could talk all about United Aircraft,
United Airlines, but that's for a totally different show. So
(33:29):
when we come back, I'll talk more about the history
of Boeing, starting with the departure of its founder. But
first let's take another quick break, all right, So we're
up to nineteen thirty four. The holding company that had
only been around for a few years had to break
(33:51):
up into three different companies, and William Boeing, who did
not take this terribly well, was fed up with everything
he had to give testimony during that congressional investigation, and
during that process he felt he was being somewhat unfairly
targeted he and his company, so he chose to retire.
(34:11):
He was fifty three years old. He divested all of
his stock in the company in the process of retiring,
and this really wasn't too far off from what his
established plan had been, because he had frequently spoken of
determining that he was going to retire by the time
he was fifty, So he actually stuck around a little
longer than his original intention happened to be. So it
(34:36):
wasn't so much that he retired early. He actually retired late.
If you take him at his word from his previous statements.
Now I'm only going to focus on Boeing in your
plane from this point forward, because, as I said, the
other companies would require their own episodes. It would just
make this far too long. Boeing the man leaves Boeing
the company in clairemont Claire, act VET. And I know
(35:01):
I've butchered that last name. It's E G T V
E D T. It's a Norwegian name and I cannot
pronounce Norwegian words to save my life. Anyway, he became
the new chairman of Boeing. He had been working for
the company since nineteen twenty. He started as a draftsman
and designer. He rose to the position of chief engineer,
(35:22):
became a vice president, and then would become the successor
to William Boeing. And he also would play an important
role in bringing the company to new heights. And yes
that was a pun. See Another thing happened in that
was really important to Boeing, and that's the the Army
Air Corps had issued a specification sort of a request
(35:45):
for proposal for the design of a long range heavy
bomber aircraft. And by long range, we're talking five thousand
miles of a range that's a heck of a distance
to travel. So Lair pursued this opportunity. He submitted a
bid that landed the company the chance to design a
(36:07):
bomber of this type, and the prototype was called the
x B fifteen. Initially, Boeing was competing against the Glen L.
Martin Company, which today is actually part of Lockheed, but
the Martin design never got to the prototype phase it
was it was canceled while it was still an idea
on paper. And the XB fifteen was quite a beast.
(36:31):
It had four engines. Most bombers at the time only
had two engines. It measured more than eighty seven and
a half feet long or twenty six point seven meters,
had a wingspan of nearly one fifty feet or nearly
forty five and a half meters when it was empty
without any bombs or anything like that. It weighed nearly
(36:52):
thirty eight thousand pounds or more than seventeen thousand kilograms,
and its top speed it could travel one dred ninety
seven miles per hour or three D seventeen kilometers per hour,
so it wasn't a speed demon, and that meant that
a five thousand mile trip would take more than thirty
hours to complete, so you would actually have multiple crews
(37:14):
on one aircraft and they would operate in shifts. The
bomber actually had sleeping quarters aboard it and so big
it was at bunks that people could sleep in. The
aircraft also featured an autopilot mode, which was pretty revolutionary
at the time. It also had independent gasoline fueled electrical
generators to act as auxiliary power units. So it was
(37:35):
a really impressive aircraft and while the military would take
possession of the prototype, it would not order more to
be made. However, Boeing would incorporate much of that aircraft's
designs into the next big project, known internally as Model TO,
but it would be known to the rest of the
world by the designation BE seventeen Flying for Trip. This
(38:01):
was another response to an Army Air Corps specification. This
one was searching for a long range bomber that could
fly at high altitudes far above anti aircraft artillery range
and also be used during daytime bombing runs. It had
to travel at least two hundred miles per hour at
top speed to meet specifications. Also had to be capable
(38:22):
of flying for ten hours at least, so Boeing would
go into competition with two other companies. Glenn Martin was
one of them, and the Douglas Aircraft Company was the other,
and this sort of flyoff competition would happen in nineteen
thirty five. Boeing's aircraft exceeded the specifications. It could travel
at a top speed of two hundred eighty seven miles
(38:45):
per hour with an average cruising speed of more than
two hundred fifty miles per hour, so it was plenty
fast enough according to the specifications. It was also heavily armed.
Uh the initial designs had five thirty caliber machine guns
and a capability of holding up to forty hundred pounds
or twenty ms of bombs. The flyoff competition went incredibly
(39:07):
well for Boeing, and the Army Air Corps put in
an initial order of sixty five of the aircraft and
nearly a hundred thousand dollars each, which amounted to about
two million dollars per plane in today's money. However, a
disaster nearly made all of that moot on October. This
is still before the whole competition is over. Boeing has
(39:30):
already received an initial preliminary order for those sixty five
aircraft well on that day. On October, Boeing employee Less
Tower and an Army Air Corps pilot named Major Player
Peter Hill were to take the prototype for another test flight.
But the control surfaces on the test the prototype aircraft.
(39:55):
Those would be the surfaces that can move in relation
to the aircraft to control things like steering, pitch, yaw
and roll. If you've ever looked at an airplane's wing
and you've seen a little flap that can go up
or down, that's the sort of control service we're talking about. Anyway,
they were all locked down and what was called gust
lock mode gust as in gust of wind. This was
(40:19):
to prevent those surfaces from being damaged by winds when
the aircraft was actually on the ground. Proper operating procedure
would include the ground crew disengaging the gust locks before
the aircraft would be allowed to taxi and then take off.
That would allow the pilot to have full control of
the aircraft in flight. Tragically, that step was not done
(40:42):
on October, so the gust locks were still in place
when they took the aircraft up and as it was climbing,
the aircraft stalled it went into a dive and Tower
and Hill could not control the plane and the plane
would crash. It kill both pilots and it injured several
people on the ground. The crash meant the aircraft could
(41:06):
not complete the full competition and the Air Corps would
cancel the order of sixty five B seventeens. Instead, they
opted to order the Douglas B eighteen Bolow aircraft. It
might have all ended there, but the Air Corps personnel
were so impressed by Boeing's performance that through some maneuvering,
the next year they were able to place an order
(41:28):
for thirteen B seventeens. This would be in November nineteen
thirty six. These would be just the first B seventeens
that Boeing would deliver to the US military. Over the
next several years, orders would continue to come in for more,
and for the first few years it was usually fewer
than forty aircraft per year, but then the United States
would enter into World War Two. But then the U
(41:52):
s would enter into World War two and Boeing would
have to step up production significantly. In total, the company
would manufacture are nearly thirteen thousand B seventeen bombers is
around twelve thousand, seven hundred or so. There were so
many orders that Boeing would be in a new position.
It would license out the aircraft designed to other manufacturers
(42:13):
like Lockheed, Vega and Douglas. So similar to what Boeing
itself had done in the past, now it was licensing,
licensing out its own designs, and the design would actually
evolve over time too. It wasn't like the B seventeen
was designed, and that's exactly how it was made. From
that point forward, the thirty caliber machine guns would be
(42:34):
replaced by fifty caliber versions. At turrets were in the
upper fuselage, the belly, and the tail of the aircraft.
The B seventeen G variant, which entered into service in
nineteen forty three, had thirteen fifty caliber machine guns. It
was pretty intimidating. The Army Air Corps also had developed
(42:54):
a strategy in which nine or twelve aircraft would fly
together in what was called a box formation, sometimes called
a staggered formation, which was a pretty daunting site. Even so,
the B seventeens needed fighter pilot escorts. They could not
just operate without any sort of fighter pilots around them
because while they could suffer an impressive amount of damage
(43:18):
and remain operational if they didn't have more maneuverable aircraft
supporting them, they were very vulnerable to enemy fighters. By
the way, despite the fact that there were thousands of
these things made, the B seventeen was not the most
produced bomber. That honor would actually go to the consolidated
Aircraft B twenty four Liberator. But the B seventeen would
(43:41):
be the most prolific US bomber in World War Two.
It dropped more bombs than any other US aircraft, which
is a dubious honor, to be sure, but one that
spoke to Boeing's design. Now, in our next episode, I'm
going to continue the story of Boeing and now the
B seventeen set the stage for an even larger and
(44:02):
much more expensive aircraft, the B twenty nine super Fortress.
I'll also talk about Boeing's contribution to commercial aircraft and
the space race. But for now it's time to sign off.
So in our next episode will continue our story. In
the meantime, if you have suggestions for future episodes of
(44:22):
Tech Stuff, you can let me know by sending an
email the addresses Tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can pop on over to our website that's
text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of
all of our past shows. There, you'll find links to
where we are on social media. You'll also find a
link to our online store, where every purchase you make
(44:44):
goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and
I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is
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