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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Journey Into Imagination: The Inside Story of the Engineers Who Brought EPCOT's Legendary Pavilion to Life

Journey Into Imagination: The Inside Story of the Engineers Who Brought EPCOT's Legendary Pavilion to Life

Carstensen, Jim
Alcorn, Steve

Paperback

Technology & EngineeringTravel General20th Century United States History

ISBN13: 9798186526186
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 10 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1979, a young engineer with a one-page resume walked into a Glendale warehouse to help build EPCOT. Nobody had ever tried anything like it before - including them.

Journey Into Imagination is the inside story of the engineers who brought EPCOT's legendary Imagination pavilion to life. Not the executives. The engineers - the people in the equipment rooms at three in the morning, covered in concrete dust, trying to find a phantom stop that kept shutting the ride down for reasons no one could explain.

Based upon recorded interview sessions with those who were there, and hundreds of pages of original 1982 memoranda, this is a first-source engineering postmortem that turns into a human story.

Along the way, you'll discover:

  • The intern who designed a ride vehicle control system using parts from a Burbank hobby shop
  • The phantom emergency stop that defied every diagnostic tool they had
  • The turntable that had to survive X-ray inspection for stress fractures
  • The memo nobody read - until it was almost too late
  • The four-word engineering philosophy that became a way of life: Yeah, they'll do that

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