133- Port of Dallas

There’s a photograph we have tacked to our studio at 99% Invisible HQ. The photo, taken 1899, shows three men, all looking very fashionable, suspended mid-air on the lifted arm of a giant dredging machine.
There are plenty of images like this from this era— scenes of people standing around proudly as they shaped the earth. And in these old photos there seems to be a real sense of awe and reverence for the marvels of civil engineering.
The above photo is a scene from the reversal of the Chicago River (see episode episode #86, true believers!). The reason that photo is famous—or at least famous enough for us to have seen it—is because the reversal of the Chicago River was an enormous engineering project that was successful.
But you have to figure that there were countless other photographs depicting similarly-awe-inspiring feats of engineering prowess that we have never seen— because those feats turned out to be failures.
Failures like the Port of Dallas.