William Allen had bet the company. Boeing's president had mortgaged the firm's future on a conviction that passengers would forsake the lulling thrum of propellers for the shrill song of the jet. On December 20, 1957, on a rain-soaked runway at Renton Municipal Airport, chief of flight test Tex Johnston proved him right. The Boeing 707-120 lifted off, climbed over the city, and brought the Jet Age to American manufacture. Less than a year later, on October 26, 1958, Pan American World Airways opened scheduled jet service to the world. Clipper America, N711PA, rumbled down the runway at Idlewild Airport in New York, paused at Gander to drink fuel, and deposited 111 passengers at Paris-Le Bourget eight hours and forty-one minutes later—barely half the time of a piston-liner crossing. Juan Trippe, Pan Am's visionary president, had placed the first order for twenty machines in October 1955. By January 1959 the 707 was flying New York to Los Angeles, shrinking a continent to a morning's work. The Dash 80 prototype had pointed the way; the 707 made the path a highway. Eight hundred and seventy-eight commercial examples left the factory before production ended in 1978, and the silhouette of its swept wings became the icon of an age.