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Searching for Answers

October 12, 2018/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon, Google, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

It used to be that finding answers meant going to the library. No more, my friend! Even a seven year old at can find the answers to anything. A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G. For better or worse, we can all find answers to our questions in an instant. (bottom two rows) There are the kids, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at their garage office in Palo Alto where they moved the company from their Stanford dorm room. The boys today. Google headquarters sign in Mountain View, CA.

Over the weekend I was on the laptop, digging around for some information to help me on a project. It’s was so easy to type in my questions, or just words to “search”, and BOOM, tons of options appear instantly on the screen. It got me to thinking about search and the history of Google, and I found out that Google is celebrating twenty years in existence (how can that be??). Google of course was an outcome of great research and experimentation by scientists and programmers who came before them. For fun, “google” the term “inventor of search” and the world’s most popular search engine will, unexpectedly, fail you. Nowhere among the algorithmically organized results will you find the names of the two men who, in the fall of 1963, sent the first known long-distance computer query (six years before Arpanet) and long before the launch of the world-changing Google. Here’s some fun facts, surprising trivia and a bit of history. Thanks Smithsonian, Wikipedia and Google for your amazing products. Enjoy!

Here’s a fun site Goggle has set up where you can venture back in time and see the most popular search topics by year (and more).

The story starts when Doug Engelbart began the Augmented Human Intellect Program at Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. In June 1962 Charlie Bourne, who had been a student of Engelbart’s at the University of California Berkeley in 1957, joined the AHI team. In 1963 Bourne started work on a project funded by US Air Force Electronic Systems Division to investigate remote online computer access to databases. The total funding was $39,000, which was quite a sizeable project in 1963.
Charles Bourne (a research engineer) and Leonard Chaitlin (a computer programmer) built the first online search engine, then referred to as automated information retrieval. At the time, retrieval was physical, capturing data stored on punch cards. Bourne’s vision was a user could search for any word in the files, much the same way Google works today, using a Q-32 computer developed by Systems Development Corporation. The Q-32 was one of the first computers to support online remote access and computer-to-computer communication.
The database consisted of seven memos typed onto punched paper tapes and then converted to magnetic tape. Chaitlin drove to Santa Monica, some 350 miles away, and input the files onto a massive military computer. From a bulky computer terminal with a screen just 32 characters wide, they sent a “search” query (the precise question is lost to history). The data lurched over a telephone line and after some time, the answer popped up, proving that online search was possible.
Despite the success, the project was shut down. The inventors later said, “We just didn’t know what it would become. You really couldn’t imagine, at that time, doing a lot of things with a computer.”
Google, worth hundreds of billions, took two men with a big dream to turn a small idea into a reality and has made a significant contribution to how the world uses the internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both PhD candidates when they met in 1996 at Stanford and came up with the concept for a search engine that they named BackRub. One year later, in 1997, they renamed it Google.com and officially registered as a domain name. A man named Milton Sirotta was responsible for coming up with the term from which Google was derived (googol – refers to the number 1 with 100 zeros following it).
The main aim of both men was to organize all of the information that could possibly be gathered around the world and present it in the form of an index. When the team received its first $100,000 check, Page and Brin moved the operation to a garage in Palo Alto.
Over the years millions of webmasters have tried their best to obtain a high PageRank, which is one of many indicators of the ‘authority’ and ‘link weight’ of any given website, however the term itself was only patented in September 2001 by the Google team. PageRank was an integral part of the core algorithm upon which the Google search engine operated, enabling it to ‘rank’ sites according to authority. It was in the same year that Larry Page, the namesake of PageRank, stepped down as CEO and Eric Schmidt took his place.
The web-based email service that is now commonplace to Gmail fans was launched in 2004 and it quickly began to outrank the services being offered by companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. The storage capabilities were set at 1 GB – a storage capacity that was unheard of at the time. 2004 was also the year that Google Earth was launched which allowed the earth to be mapped to the desktop using satellite imagery.
In 2005, Google joined up with NASA to produce Google Moon and Google Mars in which two applications allowed individuals to navigate both entities from the comfort of their own computers. The project was brought to fruition after a 1 million sq ft development center was built within the Ames Research Centre.
In 2006, Google Video was introduced to the public, and users were able to search for videos, rather than be restricted to content, through the search engine. This is the same year that the company acquired YouTube, which has in a very real sense become a massively popular ‘alternative’ search engine in its own right. In addition, the very popular Google Docs service was launched.
Today, Google is estimated to have around well over 50% of the market share for search engines with Yahoo! as its closest rival. The search engine gets more than 1 billion search requests each day, and with the incorporation of Google Ads, every click makes the company money. The business is now a household name, and there is no telling where or how they plan on expanding in the future; after all, for Google, the sky is no longer the limit.

TEST YOUR USER EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY

Before Google, came a host of web crawling “engines” – see how many you remember.

WebCrawler (1994). Of all still-surviving search engines, WebCrawler is the oldest. Today, it aggregates results from Google and Yahoo.
Lycos (1994). Born out of Carnegie Mellon University and still alive today. Also owns several other nostalgic Internet brands, including Angelfire, Tripod, and Gamesville.
AltaVista (1995). This was one of the most popular search engines in the 1990s, but was acquired by Yahoo in 2003 and subsequently shut down in 2013.
Excite (1995). One of the most recognizable brands back in the 1990s, but has since fallen out of the spotlight.
Yahoo (1995). Definitely one of the strongest pre-Google brands to still exist today. In fact, according to Alexa, Yahoo was the 4th most globally-visited website in June 2015. Impressive!
Dogpile (1996). It has a terrible brand name, but maybe that’s what made it memorable. Today, Dogpile aggregates results from Google, Yahoo, and the Russian search engine, Yandex (which is also older than Google!).
Ask Jeeves (1996). This engine was unique due to its question-and-answer format, plus it had a memorable mascot in Jeeves the Butler. Sadly, Jeeves was eventually phased out and the site rebranded to Ask.com. (Not to be confused with AskBoth.)

SEARCH ENGINE EVOLUTION TIMELINE

1990
Pre-web search engine
The Archie search engine, created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names.

1991
Pre-web search engine
The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) leads to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they search the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provides a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) is a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers.

1992
Virtual library of the web
Tim Berners-Lee sets up the Virtual Library (VLib), a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists.

1993
June
First web robot
Matthew Gray produces the first known web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and uses it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex. However, the World Wide Web Wanderer is intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search.

1993
Sept.
First web search engine
W3Catalog, written by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva, is released to the world. It is the world’s first web search engine. It does not rely on a crawler and indexer but rather on already existing high-quality lists of websites. One of its main drawbacks is that the bot accesses each page hundreds of times each day, causing performance degradation.

1993
Oct.
Second web search engine
Aliweb, a web search engine created by Martijn Koster, is announced. It does not use a web robot, but instead depends on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. The absence of a bot means that less bandwidth is used; however, most website administrators are not aware of the need to submit their data.

1993
Dec.
First crawler and indexer
JumpStation, created by Jonathon Fletcher, is released. It is the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching).

1994
Jan.
New web search engine
Infoseek is launched.

1994
Mar.
New web search engine
The World-Wide Web Worm is released. It is claimed to have been created in September 1993, at which time there did not exist any crawler-based search engine, but it is not the earliest at the time of its actual release. It supports Perl-based regular expressions.

1994
April
New web search engine
The WebCrawler search engine, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, is released. Unlike its predecessors, it allows users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since.

1994
April
New web directory
Yahoo! launches its web directory. Yahoo! would not build its own web search engine until 2002, relying until then on outsourcing the search function to other companies.

1994
July
New web search engine
Lycos, a web search engine, is released. It began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University’s main Pittsburgh campus.

1995
New web directory
LookSmart is released. It competes with Yahoo! as a web directory, and the competition makes both directories more inclusive.

1995
Dec.
Natural language queries
Altavista is launched. This is a first among web search engines in many ways: it has unlimited bandwidth, allows natural language queries, has search tips, and allows people to add or delete their domains in 24 hours.

1996
Jan.
New web search engine
Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin working on BackRub, the predecessor to Google Search. The crawler begins activity in March.

1996
May
New web search engine
Inktomi releases its HotBot search engine.

1996
Oct.
New web search engine
Gary Culliss and Steven Yang begin work at MIT on the popularity engine, a version of the Direct Hit Technologies search engine that ranks results across users according to the selections made during previous searches.

1997
April
Natural language search
Ask Jeeves, a natural language web search engine, that aims to rank links by popularity, is released. It would later become Ask.com.

1997
Sept
New web search
The domain Google.com is registered. Soon, Google Search is available to the public from this domain (around 1998).

1997
Sept
New search(non-English)
Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich launch their Russian web search engine yandex.ru and publicly present it at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. The initial development is by Comptek; Yandex would become a separate company in 2000.

1998
June
New web directory
Gnuhoo, a web directory project by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel, both employees of Sun Microsystems, launches. It would later be renamed the Open Directory Project.

1998
July
New web search portal
MSN launches a search portal called MSN Search, using search results from Inktomi. After many changes to the backend search engine, MSN would start developing in-house search technology in 2005, and later change its name to Bing in June 2009.

1998
Aug.
New web search engine
Direct Hit Technologies releases their popularity search engine in partnership with HotBot, providing more relevant results based on prior user search activity.

1999
May
New web search engine
AlltheWeb, based on the Ph.D. thesis of Tor Egge at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, titled FTP Search, launches. The engine is launched by Egge’s company Fast Search & Transfer, established on July 16, 1997.

2000
Jan.
New web search portal
Baidu, a Chinese company that would grow to provide many search-related services, launches.

2002-2003
Web search consolidation
Yahoo! buys Inktomi (2002) and then Overture Services Inc. (2003) which has already bought AlltheWeb and Altavista. Starting 2003, Yahoo! starts using its own Yahoo Slurp web crawler to power Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! Search combines the technologies of all Yahoo!’s acquisitions (until 2002, Yahoo! had been using Google to power its search).

2004
Nov
Backend providers
Microsoft starts using its own indexer and crawler for MSN Search rather than using blended results from LookSmart and Inktomi.

2004
Dec.
New User experience
Google Suggest is introduced as a Google Labs feature.

2005
Jan.
Webmaster tools
To combat link spam, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft collectively introduce the nofollow attribute.

2005
Oct.
New web search engine
Overture Services Inc. owner Bill Gross launches the Snap search engine, with many features such as display of search volumes and other information, as well as sophisticated auto-completion and related terms display. It is unable to get traction and soon goes out of business.

2006-2009
New human-curated search
Wikia launches Wikia Search, a search engine based on human curation, but then shuts it down.

2008
Jan.
New web search engine
Cuil, a web search engine created by ex-Googlers that uses picture thumbnails to display search results, launches. It would later shut down on September 17, 2010.

2009
July
Search consolidation
Microsoft and Yahoo! announce that they have made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature “Powered by Bing™” branding. All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

2009
Aug.
Search algorithm update
Named Caffeine, this update is announced on August 10, 2009. It promises faster crawling, expansion of the index, and a near-real-time integration of indexing and ranking. The rollout is made live on June 8, 2010.

2010
Sept.
New User experience
Google launches Google Instant, described as a search-before-you-type feature: as users are typing, Google predicts the user’s whole search query (using the same technology as in Google Suggest, later called the autocomplete feature) and instantaneously shows results for the top prediction. Google claims that this is estimated to save 2–5 seconds per search query. SEO commentators initially believe that this will have a major effect on search engine optimization, but soon revise downward their estimate of the impact.

2010
Nov
New web search engine
Blekko, a search engine that uses slashtags to allow people to search in more targeted categories, launches.

2011
June
Webmaster tools
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft announce Schema.org, a joint initiative that supports a richer range of tags that websites can use to convey better information.

2011
Feb.
Search algorithm update
Google launches Google Panda, a major update affecting 12% of search queries. The update continues with the earlier work of cracking down on spam, content farms, scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio. The rollout is gradual over several months, and Panda will see many further updates.

2012
Jan.
Search algorithm update
Google launches Search Plus Your World, a deep integration of one’s social data into search. SEO commentators are critical of how the search results favor Google+ and push it to users, compared to more widely used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

2012
April
Search algorithm update
Google launches its “Webspam update” which would soon become known as Google Penguin.

2012
May
Sidebar User experience
Microsoft announces a redesign of its Bing search engine that includes “Sidebar”, a social feature that searches users’ social networks for information relevant to the search query.

2012
May
Search algorithm update
Google starts rolling out Knowledge Graph, used by Google internally to store semantic relationships between objects. Google now begins displaying supplemental information about objects related to search queries on the side.

2013
Aug.
Search algorithm update
Google releases Google Hummingbird, a core algorithm update that may enable more semantic search and more effective use of the Knowledge Graph in the future.

Beginnings

October 5, 2018/0 Comments/in Elvis, Friday Afternoon, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

(top) From the documentary “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” (2018). Watch the trailer HERE (row two)Presley performing live at the Mississippi-Alabama Fairgrounds in Tupelo, September 26, 1956. (row three) Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi; Elvis, about three years old, posed with mom Gladys and dad Vernon; Ten-year-old Elvis, second from right and wearing glasses, with talent show winners. Elvis came in fifth. (row four) Promo photos for “Jail House Rock” (row five) Young man Elvis. (Row six)some of his many album covers. (row seven) Signing autographs. (bottom) And this famous photo. Elvis, 21, and his mystery blonde caught in “The Kiss”—one of 48 shots taken by freelance photographer Alfred Wertheimer (assigned by RCA Records to follow Elvis on his first tour) in a stairwell at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, minutes before a concert, June 1956.

Check out these videos with the sound as high as you can possibly crank it:
WATCH Elvis at his peak. This is GREAT!!!!!!
Goofing around having fun. Elvis Presley Heartbreak Hotel (1968)
WATCH Elvis Presley – Return To Sender [Video]
WATCH Elvis Presley – Hound Dog 1956 LIVE
WATCH Elvis Presley – Blue Suede Shoes 1956 (COLOR and STEREO)
Most of us remember our “firsts”. Our first time playing a sport and scoring a goal/run/basket, our first friendships, our first kiss, our first breakup, our first time away from home, and our first job. My first job outside of KHT was “THE BAGEL SHOP” in Oxford, Ohio. Imagine, me and food! Don’t worry this will be for another post! Getting back to my first job, I was 13 with my brothers and sisters helping Dad as he started KHT. I can still remember my first day of work here at KHT. Growing up in a family business I was lucky to be “allowed” to do all sorts of jobs – welding, driving forklifts (lots of fun when you’re little!), packaging parts, although I was always in trouble because I would read the newspaper that we used to wrap parts in, which slowed things down! I even helped Dad with the processing. . Something clicked for me, and I knew then I was destined to be a “heat treating” man. At the time, little did I know that one day I’d be sitting on top of the organization, running five thermal processing divisions, supervising 6 plants and dozens of employees, juggling millions of investment dollars into new technology and infrastructure, solving thousands of PIA (Pain in the @%$) Jobs! and forever looking to the future with my team for better ways to delight our customers. In celebration of my “firsts” I looked to an American icon. Over 70 years ago this week, in his “first” known public musical performance Elvis Presley appeared in a talent show in Tupelo, Mississippi on October 3, 1945. He was just ten years old. Here’s a little history on how he got started, some “random” trivia, and fun links to video and songs. Crank up the sound and shake it! And thanks to Wikipedia, You Tube and onthisday.com.

As the story goes, standing on a chair at a microphone, Elvis first public appearance was when he sang “Old Shep” at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. The show was broadcast over WELO Radio, though no recording of it now exists. Some reports say that he came in second and won a prize of five dollars in fair-ride tickets. Interviewed years later, however, Elvis recalled that he actually came in fifth and his most vivid memory of the day was receiving “a whipping from my Mama” for misbehaving. (A photograph taken of some of the contestants seems to bear out his recollection of the result. Wearing glasses, Elvis is standing empty-handed next to two other youngsters, both proudly clutching a trophy).
Elvis purchased his first guitar when he was just 11 years old. He wanted a rifle, but his mama convinced him to get a guitar instead. At age 12, a local radio show offered a young Elvis a chance to sing live on air, but he was too shy to go on.
His next known public performance was on November 6, 1948 when he played guitar and sang “Leaf On A Tree” as a farewell to his fellow students at Milam Junior School in Tupelo. The poverty-stricken Presleys then packed their belongings into a trunk, strapped it to the roof of their 1939 Plymouth car, and headed for Memphis, Tennessee, in search of a better life.
Notoriously shy, Elvis could still be persuaded to perform and in 1953 he nervously sang in a student talent show at Humes High School in Memphis – his next step on the educational ladder. Much to his own amazement, he received more applause than anyone else and won. Pleased, he then performed an encore.
Soon after, wanting to hear what his voice sounded like on a record, he called the Memphis Recording Service, home of the Sun label and made a private demo acetate of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” at a cost of about four dollars. Excited, he took the acetate home and gave it to his mother as a birthday present.
When Sam Phillips, owner of the studio, heard the recording, he called the boy in to hear more. And the rest, as they say, is a part of our history.
One of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, Elvis helped establish the emerging Rock and Roll sound, incorporating blues and gospel influences. He was also a leader in popularizing both the rockabilly sound and the four-man band line-up which would later dominate the music industry.
His first single, “Heartbreak Hotel” (1956), a song inspired by a newspaper article about a local suicide, began a string of number-ones that radically reshaped American music and put Presley at the forefront of rock and roll.
When performing on TV in 1956, host Milton Berle advised Elvis to perform without his guitar, reportedly saying, “Let ’em see you, son.” Elvis’ gyrating hips caused outrage across the U.S. and within days he was nicknamed Elvis the Pelvis. A Florida judge called Elvis “a savage” that same year because he said that his music was “undermining the youth.” He was subsequently forbidden from shaking his body at a gig, so he waggled his finger instead in protest.
In 1958, he was drafted into the army and served in West Germany, earning $78 per month, unable to access his musical fortune back home. Following this he began a much-derided acting career and did not perform live for seven years. In 1968 he returned to the stage with the acclaimed “Elvis” special, and then took up an extended Las Vegas residency which became iconic in its own right.
In 1959, while serving overseas in Germany, Elvis (then 24 years old) met his future wife, 14 year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They were married 8 years later.
Elvis’ 1960 hit “It’s Now or Never” so inspired a prisoner who heard it in jail that he vowed to pursue a career in music upon his release. The artist, Barry White, was then serving a 4-month sentence for stealing tires.
A series of successful concert tours followed, as did the 1973 live concert special “Aloha from Hawaii”, which was a technological first.
Elvis and Priscilla’s only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born in 1968. Lisa Marie later married Michael Jackson and actor (and Elvis obsessive) Nicholas Cage. Mr. Cage is reportedly the only person outside of Presley’s immediate family to have ever seen Elvis’ Graceland bedroom.
Elvis’ popularity faded in the 1960’s with the rise of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others. He successfully relaunched his career with a 1968 television special that came about because Elvis had walked down a busy Los Angeles street and had no one recognize or approach him.
Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977 of a heart attack at his Graceland estate in Memphis, often considered to be the result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. He is buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland mansion at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee. It receives more than 600,000 visitors from around the world each year, making it one of the top attractions in the city and one of the most-visited private homes in the world.
Presley is one of the best-selling artists in music history, recording over 600 songs (none of which he wrote) and sales of over 600 million units.

Marvel “ous”

September 28, 2018/0 Comments/in Boeing 747, Friday Afternoon, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

(Top) One of the proposed 747 designs in the Kowalski fleet. We’ve named this one Rudolph. (row 2) Yes, you do need to be a rocket scientist to fly one of these babies. (row 3) Artist depiction of the comfortable and roomy passenger seating. (row 4) The actual passenger area without seats and with seats. (row 5) The passenger seating areas. (row 6) This cargo version landing in Hong Kong. (row 7) The Hindenburg vs the Boeing 747-400. (row 8) The 747 has starred in more movies than Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, Jack Lemmon, George Kennedy and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr combined.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by airplanes. I love watching them take off, and land, and glide in the air with ridiculous ease – giant, massive structures just floating along. I can remember as a kid going out to the airport and crouching down when the planes flew over the car, thinking they were almost close enough to touch. As our heat treating aerospace business has grown, and now complimented with our latest NADCAP heat treating accreditation, I just love it when customers call with their aerospace PIA (Pain in the @%$ Jobs)! My guys jump at the chance to solve customer’s problems, and deliver consistent, “reliable” (ever think how important that is for aircraft) parts, that end up in components, and then on aircraft. Seeing planes in the air still makes me smile, because I know part of KHT is also riding along. 50 years ago this month, a marvel was introduced to the world, that changed the aviation landscape – the introduction of the Boeing 747. Bigger and better than anything at its time, it took the industry by storm, but more importantly, has been a global workhorse for airlines and a delight for passengers. I found a fun article in Smithsonian magazine, and also pulled some facts and history from Wikipedia to share. Hats off to Boeing, and all the designers, engineers, pilots, employees and maintenance crews who built over 1,500 planes, and have kept her flying all these years – Enjoy!

The Boeing 747 is an American wide-body commercial jet airliner and cargo aircraft, often referred to by its original nickname, “Jumbo Jet”. Its distinctive hump upper deck along the forward part of the aircraft has made it one of the most recognizable aircraft and the first wide-body airplane produced.
Rolled from the hangar in Everett, Washington 50 years ago this weekend, onlookers were stunned.The aircraft before them was more than double the size and weight of any existing airliner. Its instant fame came with its size – two aisles, two floors, four massive engines and a six-story tail fin, allowing millions of passengers to travel the globe, it changed aviation forever.
The four-engine 747 uses a double-deck configuration for part of its length and is available in passenger, freighter and other versions. Boeing designed the 747’s hump-like upper deck to serve as a first–class lounge or extra seating, and to allow the aircraft to be easily converted to a cargo carrier by removing seats and installing a front cargo door. Boeing expected supersonic airliners—the development of which was announced in the early 1960s—to render the 747 and other subsonic airliners obsolete, while the demand for subsonic cargo aircraft would remain robust well into the future. Though the 747 was expected to become obsolete after 400 were sold, it exceeded critics’ expectations with production surpassing expectations. By July 2018, 1,546 aircraft had been built, with 22 of the 747-8 variants remaining on order.
The 747-400, the most common variant in service, has a high-subsonic cruise speed of Mach 0.85–0.855 (up to 570 mph or 920 km/h) with an intercontinental range of 7,260 nautical miles (8,350 statute miles or 13,450 km).[14] The 747-400 can accommodate 416 passengers in a typical three-class layout, 524 passengers in a typical two-class layout, or 660 passengers in a high–density one-class configuration
In 1963, the United States Air Force started a series of study projects on a very large strategic transport aircraft. Although the C-141 Starlifter was being introduced, they believed that a much larger and more capable aircraft was needed, especially the capability to carry outsized cargo that would not fit in any existing aircraft. These studies led to initial requirements for the CX-Heavy Logistics System (CX-HLS) in March 1964 for an aircraft with a load capacity of 180,000 pounds (81,600 kg) and a speed of Mach 0.75 (500 mph or 800 km/h), and an unrefueled range of 5,000 nautical miles (9,300 km) with a payload of 115,000 pounds.
Featuring only four engines, the design also required new engine designs with greatly increased power and better fuel economy. In May 1964, airframe proposals arrived from Boeing, Douglas, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and Martin Marietta; engine proposals were submitted by General Electric, Curtiss-Wright, and Pratt & Whitney. After review, Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed were given additional study contracts for the airframe, along with General Electric and Pratt & Whitney for the engines.
All three of the airframe proposals shared a number of features. As the CX-HLS needed to be able to be loaded from the front, a door had to be included where the cockpit usually was. All of the companies solved this problem by moving the cockpit above the cargo area; Douglas had a small “pod” just forward and above the wing, Lockheed used a long “spine” running the length of the aircraft with the wing spar passing through it, while Boeing blended the two, with a longer pod that ran from just behind the nose to just behind the wing. In 1965 Lockheed’s aircraft design and General Electric’s engine design were selected for the new C-5 Galaxy transport, which was the largest military aircraft in the world at the time. The nose door and raised cockpit concepts would be carried over to the design of the 747.
The 747 was conceived while air travel was increasing in the 1960s. The era of commercial jet transportation, led by the enormous popularity of the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, had revolutionized long-distance travel. Boeing was asked by Juan Trippe, president of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), one of their most important airline customers, to build a passenger aircraft more than twice the size of the 707. During this time, airport congestion, worsened by increasing numbers of passengers carried on relatively small aircraft, became a problem that Trippe thought could be addressed by a larger new aircraft.
In April 1966, Pan Am ordered 25 747-100 aircraft for US $525 million. During the ceremonial 747 contract-signing banquet in Seattle on Boeing’s 50th Anniversary, Juan Trippe predicted that the 747 would be “… a great weapon for peace, competing with intercontinental missiles for mankind’s destiny”. As the first customer, and because of its early involvement before placing a formal order, Pan Am was able to influence the design and development of the 747 to an extent unmatched by a single airline before or since.
The original design included a full-length double-deck fuselage with eight-across seating and two aisles on the lower deck and seven-across seating and two aisles on the upper deck. Concern over safety, evacuation routes and limited cargo-carrying capability caused this idea to be scrapped in early 1966 in favor of a wider single deck design. The cockpit was, therefore, placed on a shortened upper deck so that a freight-loading door could be included in the nose cone; this design feature produced the 747’s distinctive “bulge”. In the early models it was not clear what to do with the small space in the pod behind the cockpit, so it was initially specified as a “lounge” area with no permanent seating
One of the principal technologies that enabled an aircraft as large as the 747 to be drawn up was the high-bypass turbofan engine by Pratt & Whiney. The engine technology was thought to be capable of delivering double the power of the earlier turbojets while consuming a third less fuel. General Electric had pioneered the concept but was committed to developing the engine for the C-5 Galaxy and did not enter the commercial market until later
Boeing agreed to deliver the first 747 to Pan Am by the end of 1969. The delivery date left 28 months to design the aircraft, which was two-thirds of the normal time. The schedule was so fast-paced that the people who worked on it were given the nickname “The Incredibles”. Developing the aircraft was such a technical and financial challenge that management was said to have “bet the company” when it started the project.
As Boeing did not have a plant large enough to assemble the giant airliner, they chose to build a new plant. The company considered locations in about 50 cities, and eventually decided to build the new plant some 30 miles north of Seattle on a site adjoining a military base at Paine Field near Everett, Washington.
To level the site, more than four million cubic yards (talk about a PIA Job!) of earth had to be moved. Time was so short that the 747’s full-scale mock-up was built before the factory roof above it was finished. The plant is the largest building by volume ever built, and has been substantially expanded several times to permit construction of other models of Boeing wide-body commercial jets.
The prototype 747 was first displayed to the public on September 30, 1968. Before the first 747 was fully assembled, testing began on many components and systems. One important test involved the evacuation of 560 volunteers from a cabin mock-up via the aircraft’s emergency chutes. The first full-scale evacuation took two and a half minutes instead of the maximum of 90 seconds mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and several volunteers were injured. Subsequent test evacuations achieved the 90-second goal but caused more injuries. Most problematic was evacuation from the aircraft’s upper deck; instead of using a conventional slide, volunteer passengers escaped by using a harness attached to a reel. Tests also involved taxiing such a large aircraft. Boeing built an unusual training device known as “Waddell’s Wagon” (named for a 747 test pilot, Jack Waddell) that consisted of a mock-up cockpit mounted on the roof of a truck. While the first 747s were still being built, the device allowed pilots to practice taxi maneuvers from a high upper-deck position.
On September 30, 1968, the first 747 was rolled out of the Everett assembly building before the world’s press and representatives of the 26 airlines that had ordered the airliner. Over the following months, preparations were made for the first flight, which took place on February 9, 1969, with test pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle at the controls and Jess Wallick at the flight engineer’s station. Despite a minor problem with one of the flaps, the flight confirmed that the 747 handled extremely well. The 747 was found to be largely immune to “Dutch roll”, a phenomenon that had been a major hazard to the early swept-wing jets.
First Lady Pat Nixon ushered in the era of jumbo jets by christening the first commercial 747 at a ceremony at Dulles International Airport on January 15, 1970 and the First Lady then climbed aboard and visited the cockpit.
The huge cost of developing the 747 and building the Everett factory meant that Boeing had to borrow heavily from a banking syndicate. The firm’s debt exceeded $2 billion, with the $1.2 billion owed to the banks setting a record for all companies. Allen later said, “It was really too large a project for us.” Ultimately, the gamble succeeded, and Boeing held a monopoly in very large passenger aircraft production for many years.
Following its debut, the 747 rapidly achieved iconic status, appearing in numerous film productions such as Airport 1975 and Airport ’77 disaster films, Air Force One, Die Hard 2, and Executive Decision. Appearing in over 300 film productions the 747 is one of the most widely depicted civilian aircraft and is considered by many as one of the most iconic in film history. The aircraft entered the cultural lexicon as the original Jumbo Jet, a term coined by the aviation media to describe its size and was also nicknamed Queen of the Skies.

Design Specifications based on age and size of aircraft:

Models: 747SP,747-100, 747-200B, 747-300,747-400ER, 747-8
Typical seats: 276 – 467
Cargo:   3,900 cubic feet – 6,345 cubic feet
Length:   184 ft 9 in to 250 ft 2 in
Cabin width:   239.5 in to 241 in
Wingspan:        195 ft 8 in to 224 ft 7 in
Wing area: 5,500 ft² to 5,960 sq ft
Wing sweep:    37.5°
Tail height:       65 ft 5 in
Fuel capacity: 50,359 US gal to 63,034 US gal – (that’s over $200,000 at the pump!)
Turbofan ×4: Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7 or Rolls-Royce RB211-524 or GE CF6
Thrust ×4:         46,300–56,900 lbf
Cruise: econ. 907 km/h (490 kt), max. 939km/h (507kt), Mach 0.855 (504 kn; 933 km/h)
Range: 5,830 nmi to 14,320 nmi
Takeoff: 9,250 ft to 10,200 ft

Crank up the sound and WATCH THIS! Maho beach St. Maarten, KLM Boeing 747 landing.

DOWNLOAD and read this spread from The Big Book of Airplanes. You’ll learn things like the exterior paint adds about 595 lbs. to the plane’s weight and find out what happens to toilet waste. 🙂

(top left) The cargo nose on this Nippon 747 gives it a nice smile. “Feed me!” (top right) “Open wide and say ahhh.” (bottom left) TIME LAPSE VIDEO Two GoPro views of a 60-ton riser package for oil and gas operations in Asia being loaded aboard a Cathay Pacific Cargo 747-8F at George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport on 05 July 2013. (bottom right) TIME LAPSE VIDEO of Panalpina air freight cargo loading of Atlas Air 747-400 first flight from Huntsville, Alabama to Viracopos, São Paulo, Brazil.

For more info, visit BOEING or SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE