Homegrown Ingenuity

This book is an exploration of the daring ideas, desperate industrial crises, and brilliant breakthroughs that forged our modern safety net.

Because this infrastructure is buried under concrete, hidden underwater, or launched into orbit, it remains completely invisible—until it fails. By tracing the history of these forgotten systems, this book reveals the true foundation of our modern world: a fragile, astonishing web of human ingenuity that holds our civilization together every single second of the day.