A closer look
Lead engineer Joe Sutter famously sketched the initial, rough design for the Boeing 747 jumbo jet on the back of a napkin during a meeting in the mid-1960s, completely conceptualizing the massive double-decker aircraft that would fundamentally revolutionize global travel. He and his team were given less than two and a half years to take the plane from a crude doodle at a dinner table to a fully functioning commercial airliner, a completely insane deadline that required working around the clock and aggressively fighting off meddling corporate executives. It is absolutely terrifying to realize that the gargantuan, four-engine metal bird you trust to safely hurl your fragile body across the Atlantic Ocean at six hundred miles per hour was birthed from the same creative medium typically reserved for writing down fake phone numbers at a bar. While modern software engineers need six months of agile sprints just to center a button on a web page, these mid-century mavericks willed a completely functional, sky-dominating leviathan into existence using nothing but slide rules, caffeine, and pure spite
