"The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility"
About this Quote
Impossibility, Kettering implies, is often just stagecraft: a haze deliberately (or lazily) produced by the limits of current tools, timid institutions, and the comfort people take in saying no. By calling it a "smoke screen", he reframes doubt as something manufactured rather than discovered. That word choice matters. A wall would be real; smoke is theater. It obscures, it intimidates, but it also dissipates the moment someone moves through it.
The line flatters the Wright brothers, but its real target is the culture that insisted heavier-than-air flight was a fantasy. Kettering - an inventor who helped industrialize American ingenuity through GM and Delco - knew how "impossible" gets used as a managerial argument: a stop sign disguised as physics. His phrasing turns the Wrights into a kind of antidote to bureaucratic fatalism, not just heroic tinkerers.
There's also a sly technical pun in "flew right through": it literalizes the metaphor while underlining the method. The Wrights didn't argue their way past skepticism; they tested, iterated, built wind tunnels, and made the invisible visible. Kettering's intent is evangelistic: celebrate a breakthrough while selling a broader creed of experimental modernity.
In the early 20th-century context - when patents, corporate labs, and mass production were remaking "genius" into systems - the quote functions as a warning. The greatest drag on progress isn't gravity; it's the social machinery that declares the future off-limits, then calls its own fear "common sense."
The line flatters the Wright brothers, but its real target is the culture that insisted heavier-than-air flight was a fantasy. Kettering - an inventor who helped industrialize American ingenuity through GM and Delco - knew how "impossible" gets used as a managerial argument: a stop sign disguised as physics. His phrasing turns the Wrights into a kind of antidote to bureaucratic fatalism, not just heroic tinkerers.
There's also a sly technical pun in "flew right through": it literalizes the metaphor while underlining the method. The Wrights didn't argue their way past skepticism; they tested, iterated, built wind tunnels, and made the invisible visible. Kettering's intent is evangelistic: celebrate a breakthrough while selling a broader creed of experimental modernity.
In the early 20th-century context - when patents, corporate labs, and mass production were remaking "genius" into systems - the quote functions as a warning. The greatest drag on progress isn't gravity; it's the social machinery that declares the future off-limits, then calls its own fear "common sense."
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Charles F. Kettering , entry on Wikiquote (contains: "The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility"). |
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