75th Anniversary TIME Salute

MR. GATES: They were two brothers from the heart of America with a vision as sweeping as the sky, and a practicality as down-to-earth as the bicycle shop they worked in. I've been to Kitty Hawk and seen the places where the Wright brothers imagined the future, and then literally flew across its high frontier. It was an inspiration to be there and to soak up the incredible perseverance and creativity of these two men.

It was a lonely quest for the two of them in their garage behind the shop, plotting to defy gravity and conquer the wind. Wilbur Wright said, "For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man." That kind of world-changing belief is a restless dream that drives you on to solve a problem, find the breakthrough. A force that drives you to bet everything on a fragile wing or a new idea.

The Wright brothers were the first to build a wind tunnel and empirically measure how to use the wind to lift the plane into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They reasoned out that a propeller wasn't just a flat blade, but it had to have rounded edges and, in effect, become a rotating wing.

There were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, but only one where two brothers with their unheralded persistent experimentation added wings to their wheels. By doing this, they transformed life itself. They brought families together. Once, when a child or other close relatives left the old country for America, family and friends sat in mourning for someone they would never see again. Today, the grandchild of that immigrant can return again and again across a vast ocean in just half a turn of the clock.

They were laughed at, but they never lost faith. The genius of Leonardo Da Vinci dreamed of a flying machine, but it took these two bicycle mechanics to create it. Undaunted by their first effort that literally fell apart, they persevered for years until the first working machine flew for a mere 300 feet, less than the wingspan of a 747. The lifting of those wings on that day lifted us all to new heights of freedom, giving us all access to places we could never reach before.

They gave us a tool, but it was up to individuals and nations to put it to good use, and use it we have. The airplane revolutionized both peace and war. The Wright brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing, for their invention became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together. They were the first true globalizers as flight paths became the first superhighways of a new international economy.

The Wright brothers, and their invention, made the world smaller, and brought its people closer together. It was not luck or accident but vision, quiet resolve, and the application of the scientific method that let Orville and Wilbur Wright lift up the human race. Their example reminds us that genius doesn't have a pedigree, that you don't discover new worlds by plying safe, conventional waters.

Now, at the beginning of another century, who knows where we will find the new Wright brothers, what grade of school they're in, or what garage they're inventing in. Our mission is to make sure that wherever they are, they have the chance to run their own course, to persevere and follow their own inspiration. We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific, they are liberating forces that can continually improve people's lives. Who would have thought that as this century opened that one of the greatest contributions would come from two obscure, fresh-faced young Americans who pursued the utmost bounds of human thought, and gave us all, for the first time, the power to literally sail beyond the sunset, soaring on the air.

The 20th Century has been the American Century in large part because of great inventors like the Wright brothers. May we follow their flight paths and blaze our own.

(Applause.)