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19161776 Club

Boeing and Westervelt incorporate Pacific Aero Products in a Seattle boat works

A broken Martin hydroaeroplane and months-long waits for parts pushed the timber heir and his Navy engineer friend to build planes themselves.

William Boeing bought his own airplane and quickly learned the trouble with owning one: when it broke, replacement parts could take months to arrive. That frustration, and a damaged Martin hydroaeroplane flown by test pilot Herb Munter, pushed Boeing and his friend George Conrad Westervelt, a Navy engineer, toward a different plan. On July 15, 1916, the two men incorporated Pacific Aero Products in an old boat works on the Duwamish River near Seattle. It would later be renamed Boeing…

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More from July 15
1870

Georgia is readmitted; the last Confederate state formally returns to the Union

Five years after Appomattox, Georgia completes the steep terms of Reconstruction, ratifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and seating Black legislators under the new rules.
1979

Carter tells the nation it suffers a 'crisis of confidence'; he never says the word malaise

With gas lines stretching for hours and inflation gnawing at paychecks, the President goes on live television to diagnose a mood, not announce a fix.
1862

CSS Arkansas steams alone through two Union fleets; Vicksburg's guns shelter her by nightfall

Lt. Brown's ironclad fights down the Yazoo, batters the Carondelet, Lancaster, and Pinola at close range, and reaches port with 30 casualties.
20091776 Club
STS-127 clears the pad at 6:03 p.m. carrying the final pieces of Japan's Kibō laboratory, the last major addition to the station's Japanese wing.
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Read the full July 15 edition →Everything that happened on July 15 →
More from Gilded Age & Progressive Era
1914

Congress creates an aviation section inside the Signal Corps; $250,000 to get it started

Public Law 143 gives the Army's handful of planes a formal home, but keeps aviation folded inside the Signal Corps rather than making it a branch of its own.
1893

A schoolteacher rides a mule to 14,000 feet and writes a poem called "Pikes Peak"

Katharine Lee Bates jots the first lines in a notebook, with a nation in economic depression spread out below her.
1898

The American flag rises over ʻIolani Palace; Hawaii's sovereignty ends in a ceremony

Queen Liliʻuokalani stays away, waiting out the hour at Washington Place instead.
1898

Spain surrenders Manila after a battle both sides agreed to fake

Governor-General Jáudenes chose defeat by Americans over capture by Filipino rebels camped at the city walls.
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