It really is almost everything.

Infrastructure is just about everything that makes civilization physically possible.

Roads, bridges, water supply, sewage removal, dams, and so forth.

The physical part of civilization is the infrastructure.

That's Henry Petrosky.

Well, my name is Henry Petrosky.

I'm a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University.

He's written a number of books about catastrophic failures in engineering,

and also one about the history of the toothpick so he's he's one of us.

His most recent book is all about infrastructure.

The name of the book is The Road Taken, The History and Future of America's infrastructure.

A couple weeks ago I interviewed Dr. Petroski about his book and the state of infrastructure in the U.S.

The first of many things that I learned that shocked me was that the word infrastructure itself is actually kind of new to English.

What we call infrastructure today used to be called public works and in America public works was probably a familiar term up until the 1980s,

but Public Works became a term closely associated with what was called pork barrel,

which was also considered in a rather pejorative term

because it had to do with building things

that were considered unnecessary or wasteful.

Pork barrel is government spending pushed forward by a congressperson to solely benefit the people in their home district.

It was associated with politics that was tit for tat, you vote for my pork, I'll vote for yours.

But the connection between public works and government corruption got even worse than

trading votes.

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