I loved the story about how Juan Trippe was insistent that they deliver a double deck airliner, and the more Joe Sutter and his team thought about it, they thought it would be a failure if they made it that way. They had a big meeting to convince him, and when the Boeing team went to New York to meet with Juan Trippe, they found out how wide the conference room was and one of their savvy guys brought a length of string with him.
When Trippe began to stubbornly insist that a single deck wouldn't have the room they needed for the number of passengers and they would have to be packed in, the guy brought out the string and stretched it across the room and demonstrated how wide it would be with one deck, and Trippe went along with it.
(I hope I got that right from memory...I read the book some time back!)
Both Boeing and Pan Am bet the companies on that airplane.
Having some idea of your interests from your posts over the years, I suspect you have already read this book: 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation which I (as an aviation enthusiast) found fascinating.
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That’s an expensive book, but my library has it and I just placed a hold.
I read a while back that Boeing almost sold the rights to the 737 to pay for some of the 747 development costs. I bet they are glad they didn’t.