William Boeing

William Boeing was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Marie M. Ortmann, from Vienna, Austria, and Wilhelm Böing (1846–1890), a wealthy mining engineer, from Hohenlimburg, Germany. Wilhelm Böing had emigrated to the United States in 1868 and initially worked as a laborer. His move to the United States was disliked by his father and he received no financial support. He later made a fortune from North Woods timber lands and iron ore mineral rights on the Mesabi Range of Minnesota, north of Lake Superior.

In 1890, when William was eight, his father died of influenza and his mother soon moved to Europe. Marie enrolled William Jr. and his sister at schools in Switzerland. William attended school in Vevey, Switzerland, and returned to the US for a year of prep school at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. William Boeing's mother remarried in 1898 and moved to Virginia. He enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1898, studying in the engineering department of the Sheffield Scientific School, but dropped out in 1903 to go into the lumber business.

In 1903, at age 22, Boeing moved to Hoquiam, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest. He purchased extensive timberland around Grays Harbor on the Olympic Peninsula and bought into lumber operations. He prospered in the business during a nationwide construction boom. He was successful in the venture, in part by shipping lumber to the East Coast via the then-new Panama Canal, generating funds that he would later apply to a very different business.

While being president of Greenwood Timber Company, Boeing, who had experimented with boat design, traveled to Seattle. During the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909, he saw a piloted flying machine for the first time and became fascinated with aircraft. In 1910, at the Dominguez Flying Meet, Boeing asked every pilot foreign and domestic if he could go for an airplane ride and was repeatedly denied except for French aviator Louis Paulhan. Boeing waited and Paulhan finished the meet and left, never giving Boeing his ride.

Boeing took flying lessons at Glenn L. Martin Flying School in Los Angeles and purchased one of Martin's planes. Martin pilot James Floyd Smith traveled to Seattle to assemble Boeing's new Martin TA hydroaeroplane and continue to teach its owner to fly. Huge crates arrived by train and Smith assembled the plane in a tent hangar erected on the shore of Lake Union. Boeing's test pilot, Herb Munter, soon damaged the plane.

When he was told by Martin that replacement parts would not be available for months, Boeing told his friend, Commander George Conrad Westervelt of the US Navy, "We could build a better plane ourselves and build it faster." Westervelt agreed. They soon built and flew the B & W Seaplane, an amphibian biplane that had outstanding performance. Boeing decided to go into the aircraft business, using an old boat works on the Duwamish River near Seattle for his factory.

In 1921, Boeing married Bertha Marie Potter Paschall (1891–1977). She had previously been married to Nathaniel Paschall, a real estate broker with whom she had two sons, Nathaniel "Nat" Paschall Jr. and Cranston Paschall. The couple had a son of their own, William E. Boeing Jr. (1922–2015). The stepsons went into aviation manufacturing as a career. Nat Paschall was a sales manager for competitor Douglas Aircraft, which later became McDonnell Douglas. Bill Jr. became a private pilot and industrial real estate developer.

Bertha Boeing was the daughter of Howard Cranston Potter and Alice Kershaw Potter. Through her father, she was a descendant of the founders of Alex. Brown & Sons merchant bankers Alexander Brown, James Brown, and Brown's son-in-law and partner Howard Potter; and through her mother, the granddaughter of Charles James Kershaw and Mary Leavenworth Kershaw (a descendant of Henry Leavenworth).