We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio?

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

If the Wright brothers hadn't put their lives on the line, we would not be flying around the world these days. So we need pioneers.

If the Wright Brothers were alive today, Orville would have to lay off Wilbur.

Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainment. In the brief span of thirty-odd years, the world has seen an inventor's dream first materialized by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk become an everyday actuality.

When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.

There's a historical milestone in the fact that our Apollo 11 landing on the moon took place a mere 66 years after the Wright Brothers' first flight.

The reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

There was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, 'Ooh, hey, I can do that.' There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousands of pilots.

Innovation really is the life blood of our American economy... looking back at the stories of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers, you look at emergence to technology innovation and what it has done for our economy. We need to continue that.