I just finished reading The Devil in the White City, which is about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and intercuts the story with serial killer H. H. Holmes’ cr

I just finished reading The Devil in the White City, which is about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and intercuts the story with serial killer H. H. Holmes’ crimes. What struck me most was how the event’s success was far from guaranteed, and it took a mix of national/civic pride, hubris, ambition, and luck to pull it off. We tend to think of massive engineering projects as guaranteed successes and scaling to fill their need, but I think we underestimate how much influence individual people have in pulling these projects off. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City