It was only about a decade after the Wright Brothers’ first flight that Bill Boeing, who was in the timber business in Seattle, decided to learn how to fly planes. After he ordered a plane of his own, Boeing decided the design left room for to be improved upon. So he did. In 1934, TIME called him “a hard-headed industrialist who turned to flying as a hobby, began making airplanes as a whim and ended up by giving the world a new standard of aircraft performance.”
The eponymous company he founded in 1916 has been part of nearly every step of the aviation industry’s evolution, from wood-and-canvas contraptions to the jets of the modern age.
In a new book, Higher: 100 Years of Boeing, by Russ Banham (available Aug. 4), 200 photos—mostly from Boeing’s company archives—are used to trace that history, and all of the pit-stops in between.
