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

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
From the mud pit that was the EPCOT construction site to the bittersweet morning when the pavilion's song faded into history, Journey Into Imagination follows the accidental family of engineers who built something none of them could have built alone — and then watched it change around them for the next forty years.

This isn't a press release. It's an engineering story. And the best engineering stories are always about the people.