A lot.

Almost 10 million people board over 100,000 flights every single day.

Between them and the 17.5 billion dollars worth of goods that are flown around the world

daily, it’s safe to say that aviation is one of the pillars of the modern world.

That’s why this week on Behind the Business we’ll be taking a look at the largest aircraft

manufacturer in the world, Boeing.

Our story begins at the turn of the 20th century.

Back then the world was in many ways a larger place than it is now.

Most people got around on horseback, except the wealthy few who could afford the earliest

commercial automobiles.

A trip across the Atlantic took at least six days, and the average person wouldn’t travel

more than 50 miles away from his home.

In short, travel was time-consuming and expensive.

Then, on December 17th 1903, two brothers did what was for most of human history considered

to be impossible: The Wright brothers made the first successful

flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft, ushering in the pioneer era of aviation.

In the span of a single decade, aviation stopped being a fringe hobby for wealthy enthusiasts

and became one of the most competitive industries of the time.

It is in the middle of this dramatic advance in technology that a young entrepreneur saw

opportunity.

For William Boeing, aviation felt like an industry he was born to develop.

He was the son of a wealthy German-American industrialist, who held the rights to huge

swaths of timberland around Lake Superior.

William had already obtained an engineering degree from Yale by the time he inherited

these lands, and in his 20s he established a very successful logging business.

The profits from that business went into various side-ventures of his, like buying a shipyard

in Seattle to build himself a yacht, or outfitting several expeditions to Alaska.

One particular field that caught his interest was aviation.

He got his first chance to fly in an airplane in 1914, and he liked it so much that he signed

up for flying lessons and ordered a Martin TA floatplane.

William then got in touch with his friend George Westervelt, a U.S. Navy engineer who

also had a passion for aviation.

Together they created an improved floatplane, whose most prominent feature was the addition

of a second pontoon for stability.

They tested it out in MIT’s newly built wind tunnel, and it flew much better than

its Martin TA counterpart.

This was all the validation William needed and on July 15th, 1916 he incorporated the

business as the Pacific Aero Products Company.

He called the first airplane model the Bluebill, and before the year was over he had another

model in the making.

He was more than ready to pour capital into this new venture, and in just under six months

he hired 30 employees and converted his Seattle shipyard into a makeshift airplane factory.

When the US entered World War 1 in 1917, Westervelt decided to leave the company after being deployed

to the East Coast.

William took the chance to name the company after himself, and he set about filling the

newly created demand for military aircraft.

William’s first independent airplane was the Model C, in which he introduced several

important innovations.

By tilting the wings two degrees upward, and by placing the upper wing slightly in front

of the lower one, the Model C outperformed its competitors by a wide margin.

The US Navy was very impressed and it ordered 50 aircraft, which prompted William to expand

his operations.

By 1918 Boeing’s workforce had increased elevenfold, and they were manufacturing the

airplanes of several other companies: not out of generosity, but due to wartime cooperation

laws.

When the war ended that November, however, Boeing saw half of its orders cancelled.

Worse yet, there was almost no demand for civilian airplanes, since the military had

dumped a large portion of its older models onto the free market.

William was left with hundreds of idle workers, but instead of firing them he repurposed his

Seattle factory to produce residential furniture using the ample supply of spruce wood nearby.

Nevertheless, the company was losing money, and William had to pay 700 dollars in weekly

wages out of his own pocket.

In 1919 Boeing signed a modest contract with the US Army to modernize 300 Havilland DH-4

fighter planes, but no bank was willing to extend the company a line of credit.

The early 1920s saw Boeing’s first attempt at designing an airplane specifically for

commercial use.

They called the plane the BB-L6, a single aircraft custom built for a local pilot doing

air tours.

Despite being eager to enter the commercial sector, Boeing’s biggest client by far was

still the military, both in war and peace.

The recently-established US Army Air Service, the forefather of the US Air Force, was responsible

for saving William’s company for bankruptcy.

They ordered 200 open-cockpit biplanes in 1921, and Boeing happily provided them with

the MB-3A at 7,240 dollars a piece one year later.

At around that time Boeing’s engineers got their hands on the Fokker D. VII, an advanced

German fighter plane from WW1.

They greatly improved upon the plane’s design, replacing its wooden fuselage with one welded

from steel and braced with piano wire.

This prototype fighter could reach a top speed of 159 miles per hour, and the US military

ended up buy 150 planes by 1928.

One year prior to that William had made the lucrative decision of getting into the airmail

business.

Now, the US Post Office had created the first regularly scheduled airmail service in 1918

between Washington, DC and New York.

The signing of the Air Mail Act of 1925 gave the US Post Office the ability to grant contracts

to private companies, and William seized the opportunity by creating the Boeing Air Transport

company in 1927.

It’s first airplane was the Boeing Model 40A, whose light 420-horse-power engine allowed

it to carry twice the usual payload for its size.

Unlike its competitors it would carry mail and passengers at the same time, and by the

end of the year it the BAT had transported almost 2000 people and 67 tons of mail.

In 1928 William negotiated a deal to buy out his only big airmail competitor and a few

months later he also acquired Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, the company that made Boeing’s

engines.

By the end of the decade Boeing had become a near-monopoly in aviation.

During the early 1930s commercial air travel was finally starting to take off, and William

capitalized on this by developing the Model 80, a 12-passenger biplane.

Boeing had designed the plane with comfort in mind, and it was the first aircraft to

have registered flight attendants on board.

Despite the advent of the Great Depression, the aviation industry was booming, and by

1933 Boeing transported half of all passengers and airmail in the US.

That same year they introduced the Boeing 247, the first modern airliner, which featured

a dozen innovations like variable pitch propellers, wing deicers, and a fully functional autopilot.

It was better than any passenger plane up until that point, but Boeing made the arrogant

decision of reserving the first 60 aircraft for its own airline.

This was a massive red flag, and in 1934, after a quick Congressional investigation

on anti-trust grounds, the federal government passed the Air Mail Act of 1934, which broke

up all aviation holding companies.

Suddenly, Boeing was split in three: United Air Lines took control of the air transport

business, United Aircraft took over the manufacturing business in the East, and Boeing retained

the manufacturing business in the West.

William was devastated: He sold his entire stake in the company and

retired to breeding thoroughbred horses for the rest of his life.

The split hurt Boeing immensely, and other companies quickly rose up to take its place.

Boeing’s most notable competitor at the time was Douglas Aircraft, whose legendary

DC-3 airliner from 1936 was both larger and faster than the Boeing 247.

The DC-3 was so good that it’s still in use to this day.

Its success convinced the engineering team at Boeing that bigger was indeed better.

This was a dramatic shift in the company’s approach to aviation.

Up until that point, the company was unequivocally known for its small, but durable fighter planes.

With Europe on the brink of war, Boeing developed a revolutionary bomber of unprecedented scale

for the US military.

The Boeing B-17, dubbed the Flying Fortress, was the largest and heaviest bomber built

at the time.

Powered by four 750-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines, the B-17 was one of the US’s greatest

strategic weapons: it could comfortably carry up to 8,000 pounds

of bombs and it was protected by 13 12.7 millimeter machine guns mounted in 8 positions.

Calling the B-17 a success would not do it justice:

over the course of WW2 over 12,000 of these bombers were built, each costing 240,000 thousand

dollars, and collectively they dropped 640,000 tons of bombs on Axis territory.

The B-17 became Boeing’s saving grace, and it cemented the company’s decision to design

larger aircraft.

In the late 1930s Boeing developed two commercial aircraft that were also technologically impressive:

In 1939 they introduced the Boeing 314 Clipper, whose unprecedented range of 3,600 miles made

it the first aircraft to fly regular scheduled flights between the US and Britain.

One year later in 1940 they created the first commercial aircraft with a pressurized cabin,

the Boeing 307 Stratoliner.

It could fly up to altitudes of 20,000 feet at a time when other airplanes could barely

climb above 14,000 feet due to oxygen deprivation.

The 1940s saw Boeing restore its position as the top aircraft manufacturer in the United

States.

Towards the end of the Second World War, they were building over 350 planes each month,

and their workforce had ballooned to over 78,000 employees by 1943.

A year later Boeing developed the B-29 Superfortress, a beefed-up version of the B-17 that weighed

twice as much, yet was faster and could carry an extra 12,000 pounds of bombs.

Two special B-29s, the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, would become the only two planes in history

to drop atomic bombs, above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.

With the war won, Boeing and its competitors returned to the free market, but the sad reality

was that no war meant little demand.

Boeing’s sales declined from a wartime high of 421 million dollars in 1945 to barely 13

million dollars just one year later, and they were forced to lay off almost 70,000 workers.

The decade after WW2 saw the proliferation of jet technology, which was pioneered by

the German Luftwaffe in 1939.

Boeing produced two subsonic jet bombers, the B-47 and the B-52, and they were very

successful, but in 1957 the Cold War steered the aviation industry in a very different

direction: When the Soviet Union launched the first artificial

satellite around Earth’s orbit, the Sputnik 1, the American public was in awe.

This small, 23 inch wide sphere served as a wake up call for the US, and it’s launch

triggered the famous Space Race that kickstarted aerospace development.

The USSR accomplished another historic achievement just four years later by getting Yuri Gagarin

into outer space aboard his Vostok spacecraft.

This caught NASA off-guard, and forced President Kennedy to famously vow to get the first man

on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

The entire aerospace industry was drafting up ideas for the Apollo missions, but by that

point Boeing was already knee-deep in developing rocket technology.

They had started working on a prototype surface-to-air guided missile way back in 1946, and by 1955

they had a working model ready for production.

Boeing called these missiles Bomarc and ended up selling almost 600 units.

Bomarc’s impressive capabilities landed Boeing a pivotal government contract in 1958,

which requested the construction of a land-based intercontinental ballistic missile.

What Boeing developed was a technological marvel:

the LGM-30 Minuteman, a three-stage solid-fuel rocket capable of delivering three nuclear

warheads, each packing around 500 kilotons of energy, which adds up to about one leveled

Manhattan.

At around that time Boeing decided it was time to reclaim their lost share of the commercial

airline business.

They borrowed the swept-wing design of the B-47 jet bomber and dumped a stunning 16 million

dollars, or 25% of the company’s total worth at the time, into the creation of the Boeing

707.

It was a huge gamble, since many airports couldn’t even fit a jet airliner on their

runways, but the aircraft’s speed, size and reliability proved its worth.

Boeing ended up selling over a thousand Boeing 707s, some of which are still flying regular

routes.

This model was the basis for an entire family of jet airliners that are still among the

most used commercial aircraft in the world.

The Boeing 737, introduced in 1968, is the best-selling jet airliner in history, and

it has remained so popular that by the time you’re done listening to this sentence,

two 737s would have departed or landed somewhere across the globe.

Just two years later Boeing introduced the Boeing 747, but it was vastly different from

its predecessors.

It was Boeing’s first wide-body jet airliner, and it featured a double-deck configuration

that could seat over 400 passengers.

It’s humungous size gave it an initial price tag of 24 million dollars, but today these

beauties can go for as high as 350 million.

The R&D costs behind the 747 were so high, that in its final stages of development Boeing’s

engineers were working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, and were owed several paychecks.

The overtime was worth it though, since to date Boeing have produced over 15 hundred

747s.

Despite its success, Boeing and the aerospace industry in general were hurt badly during

the 1970s.

The oil crisis from 1973 quadrupled the price of the main component of jet fuel, which caused