![]() ![]() Plant Two in Seattle was transformed into one of the nation's first modern assembly lines, having a massive floor space of 1.7 million square feet and turning out up to 362 planes a month. Just in Boeing plants in the Seattle area, employment totaled in at 50,000 workers. In 1944, its sales totalled over 600 million dollars – approximately ten times the value of all manufacturing in Seattle five years earlier. In a 1943 report, Washington's Secretary of State Belle Reeves declared, "No state has been more profoundly affected economically by the expansion of war industries than Washington." And no other Washington company was affected more profoundly than Boeing. The entire nationwide aircraft industry was kicked into high gear in a cooperative, multi-company effort. ![]() So it came as a godsend when war contracts began arriving from the U.S. By the end of 1934, Boeing was 266,000 dollars in debt. In 1934, total company employment plummeted from 1,700 in the beginning of the year to just 600 in August. Sales to the Army and Navy during World War I drastically grew the business, now renamed as the Boeing Airplane Company, but when the war came to a close and the Great Depression set in, Boeing suffered financially with the rest of the nation. The small business employed sixteen workers and paid them fourteen to forty cents per hour. In 1916, in Seattle, Washington, a pioneering entrepreneur named William Boeing entered the aircraft industry for the first time, founding the Pacific Aero Products Company. ![]()
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