Boeing

William Boeing, a Seattle timber heir fascinated by the young art of flight, founded his aircraft company in 1916, barely a dozen years after the Wright brothers first left the ground. From a lakeside workshop it grew, along with aviation itself, into the largest aerospace manufacturer in the world, building the machines that carried Americans into the sky for both travel and war.

The Second World War made Boeing an arsenal. Its heavy bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress, flew the strategic bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan, and it was a B-29 that dropped the atomic bombs in 1945. After the war Boeing led the jet age with the 707, which made intercontinental air travel routine, and in 1969 its enormous 747 jumbo jet brought the cost of flying down far enough to open the skies to the middle class.

Boeing became a pillar of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, its fortunes tied to government contracts for warplanes, missiles, and spacecraft, including major roles in the Apollo program and the space station. Its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas left it, along with Europe's Airbus, one of only two makers of large commercial jets in the world, a duopoly at the commanding heights of a strategic industry.

In recent years the company's reputation for engineering excellence has been badly shaken. Two crashes of its 737 MAX airliner in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people, led to a worldwide grounding and revelations of flaws in the plane's design and the oversight of its safety. The crisis turned Boeing into a cautionary tale about what can happen when cost and schedule crowd out the engineering culture that built it.