Originally Posted by
Maluku_Flyer
He was born in Detroit. His father, Wilhelm Böing, was born in Germany.
Anglicised the name before WW I. And he followed the German custom of changing the "ö" to "oe" *) in non-German languages. Since English speakers tend to simply ignore umlauts, they would have spelled his name Boing.
*) That was the original spelling anyway, the "ö" was introduced as a shorthand for "oe".
Typically, umlauts are replaced with an "e" after the vowel when they're not available in the typeset. I don't know if this came about with computers. I suppose it would have been possible to combine a vowel and over-type it with a double quote to get an umlauted character.
My old cell phone used to say "ZUERICH" on it whenever I was in Zürich. However, my iPhone doesn't show the cell tower information any longer.
www.boeing.de used to belong to someone else.
http://web.archive.org/web/200003021...www.boeing.de/