Donald Wills Douglas, Sr.

Douglas was born in Brooklyn, New York, the second son of an assistant cashier at the National Park Bank. He attended Trinity Chapel School and was of Scottish descent.

After graduation in 1909, he enrolled in the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He had been an early aviation enthusiast; at the age of 16 in the fall of 1908, he convinced his mother that he needed to witness the Fort Myer trials of the Wright Flyer. He later built model airplanes, some with rubber-bands and other motors, in his dormitory room at Annapolis and tested them on the grounds and in the academy's armory. In 1912 he resigned from the academy in order to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering.

After being turned down for jobs by Grover Loening and Glenn Curtiss, Douglas enrolled in MIT. He received his Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering—the first person to receive such a degree from MIT—in 1914, completing the four-year course in half the time; he remained there another year as an assistant to Professor Jerome Hunsaker.

In 1915 Douglas joined the Connecticut Aircraft Company, participating in the designing of the Navy's first dirigible, the DN-1. In August 1915, Douglas left for the Glenn Martin Company where he was, at the age of 23, chief engineer, where he designed the Martin S seaplane. Shortly after Glenn Martin merged with Wright Company to form Wright-Martin, Douglas resigned to become, in November 1916, the chief civilian aeronautical engineer of the Aviation Section of the US Army Signal Corps. Soon thereafter he returned to the newly reformed Glenn L. Martin Company, in Cleveland, Ohio, again becoming their chief engineer. Douglas designed the Martin MB-1 bomber.

In March 1920, Douglas resigned from his $10,000 (equivalent to $161,000 in 2025) a year job to return to California, where he had met and, in 1916, married Charlotte Marguerite Ogg (1892–1976). They had four sons and one daughter including Donald Jr.

He soon started his first aircraft company, Davis-Douglas Company with $40,000 financing from partner David Davis. They worked together to attempt to build an aircraft that could fly coast to coast nonstop, the Douglas Cloudster. Following an unsuccessful attempt, Davis left the partnership, and Douglas founded the Douglas Aircraft Company.