Big Optimism: 747

And a cool new thing I am trying that I hope you’ll try with me!

Free for ALL Friday is below. But first ...

I have an idea and I’m going to give it a try, to see if there’s interest.

After about nine months and nearly 100 Life Story Magic interviews, I’d like to use what I’ve learned to launch a free, weekly, do-it-yourself life story newsletter.

I’m calling it Next Question by Life Story Magic. The idea:

➡️ 💭 Each week, I’ll ask you one question.

➡️ 📝 Answer it. Save it somewhere. Share it if you want.

➡️ 🧩 Bit by bit, we’ll build your life story.

Better yet, forward the email to someone you care about and invite them to sign up and build their story, too.

I’m going to launch with a 13-week schedule, based on top questions I find that prompt great, colorful answers almost every time. From there — well, we’ll see how it goes.

I went back and forth on whether just to use one day a week on Understandably for this project, but I think it makes sense to keep it separate.

If you’d like to try it out, sign up here. The first edition is set to go out Monday, October 5.

747

In the 1920s and 1930s a boy named Joe was growing up in Seattle, and one thing about Joe was that he really loved airplanes.

Photo by Nafis Al Sadnan on Unsplash

Fortunately for him, he lived on a hill overlooking Boeing, the airplane manufacturer.

“On summer days,” he later recalled, “my brothers and I would walk down ... There we’d watch technicians working ... Occasionally a leather-clad test pilot would climb into a Boeing military biplane like a knight mounting his steed.”

His heroes: those aviators, and of course Charles Lindbergh, who made his solo transatlantic flight when Joe was 6.

Joe paid for his aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Washington partly by working at Boeing. Then World War II came, and Joe — a Navy ROTC cadet — got sent to a destroyer escort instead of getting the pilot training he asked for.

Toward the end of the war, while he was stationed on a remote Pacific island, two job offers arrived: one from Douglas in California, and one from Boeing, back home in Seattle.

Newly married and with a child on the way, he took the job closer to home. He rose through the ranks, even though he was surrounded by graduates of Caltech, MIT, and Michigan, who looked down on his degree from Washington.

He worked on many of Boeing’s top commercial airplane projects of the 1950s and ‘60s, like the Dash 80, the 707, 727, and 737. But he wasn’t part of the sexiest project of all: a supersonic passenger jet, which almost everyone in aviation assumed was the future.

Which is why, in 1965, he was available to run a massive new Boeing project.

That project? The 747. And the engineer put in charge of it was Joe Sutter.

The story goes that Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe and Boeing president Bill Allen agreed to build it while on a salmon fishing trip together, and sealed the deal with a handshake. Pan Am’s formal order, for 25 planes worth more than half a billion dollars, followed in 1966.

Sutter’s assignment: 28 months (about 2/3 the regular time) to design and build a jet 2.5 times as large as anything else in the air.

His team grew to 4,500 engineers. At one point Boeing ordered him to lay off 1,000 of them. Sutter refused, and walked out of the meeting certain he’d be fired. He kept his job, and so did his engineers.

Then came a tussle with Trippe, who wanted a double-decker — basically two 707 fuselages stacked one above the other. But evacuating that plane quickly in an emergency would be very difficult.

Also, everyone assumed the 747 would have a short life as a passenger jet once supersonics took over, so it needed to be easy to turn into a cargo plane.

That’s how Sutter and his team came up with the wide-body jet: one wide deck, two aisles, 10 seats across. It also explains the 747’s famous hump. To load cargo straight in through a nose that swung up, the cockpit had to sit above the main deck.

Now they had to sell it to Trippe.

Boeing’s team met with Pan Am in a New York conference room exactly as wide as the planned cabin, and unrolled a 20-foot clothesline across it. Then Boeing built full-size mockups of both designs so Trippe could walk through them.

Inside the wide-body mockup, Trippe asked what the space up in the hump would be used for. Sutter said it could be a rest area for the crew.

No, Trippe said. That would be for passengers.

That’s when Sutter knew he’d won.

Rollout of the 747 was September 30, 1968: 58 years ago this week.

Charles Lindbergh saw it, too.

“You know, this is one of the great ones,” he said.

The 747 made long-haul flying affordable for ordinary people, and it stayed in production for 54 years.

Sutter later served on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster. He stayed on at Boeing as senior adviser emeritus for a quarter-century, and was still going to his office once a week in May 2016, at 95. He died that August.

“The world was a very wide place when I was born,” Joe Sutter wrote in his book, 747. “Then along came Lindbergh.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 27: "Je tiens l'affaire!" ("I've got it!") — Jean-François Champollion, to his brother when he cracked the phonetic key to hieroglyphs, shortly before he fainted from excitement. On this day in 1822, he presented his findings to a packed room at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

• Monday, September 28: "I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine." — Alexander Fleming, recalling the morning of this day in 1928, when he noticed that a mold growing in a petri dish had killed the bacteria around it. The mold's "juice" became penicillin, which earned Fleming a share of the 1945 Nobel Prize.

• Tuesday, September 29: "Godspeed the work begun this noon." — President Theodore Roosevelt, laying the foundation stone of the Washington National Cathedral on this day in 1907. The final stone was set on the same date in 1990, exactly 83 years later, with President George H. W. Bush in attendance.

• Wednesday, September 30: "I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating Hoover Dam on this day in 1935. It was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed.

• Thursday, October 1: "The children of California shall be our children." — Leland Stanford, after the death of his only son, whose memory he and his wife Jane honored by founding Stanford University, which opened on this day in 1891. Tuition was free for the university's first students.

• Friday, October 2: "I cross this forbidden line as a president... The wall will fall." — South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, moments before walking across the military demarcation line into North Korea on this day in 2007. He was the first South Korean president to cross the line, on his way to an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

• Saturday, October 3: "Now what belongs together will grow together." — Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, speaking the day after the Berlin Wall opened in November 1989; Germany formally reunified at midnight on this day in 1990. East and West had been divided for 45 years.