America Revealed - Season 1

Over the past century, an American industrial revolution has given rise to the biggest, most productive food machine the world has ever known. In this episode, host Yul Kwon explores how this machine feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day. He discovers engineering marvels we've created by putting nature to work and takes a look at the costs of our insatiable appetite on our health and environment. For the first time in human history, less than 2% of the population can feed the other 98%. How does this all work? Who are the men and women who keep us fed 365 days a year? Yul embarks on a trip across the country to find out.

America is a nation of vast distances and dense urban clusters, woven together by 200,000 miles of railroads, 5,000 airports, and four million miles of roads. These massive, complex transportation systems combine to make Americans the most mobile people on earth. Yul Kwon journeys across the continent by air, road and rail and ventures behind the scenes with the workers who get us where we need to go. At the Federal Aviation Administration command center, he listens in on a call with NASA, the secret service, the military and every major airline to learn how our national flight plan works today. He meets innovators who are creating ways to propel us farther and faster in years to come; in Las Vegas, he heads out into the wild night to see how transportation analysts are keeping traffic at bay by revolutionizing the use of one basic tool: the traffic light.

Our modern electric power grid has been called the biggest and most complex machine in the world — delivering electricity over 200,000 miles of high-tension transmission lines. Yul Kwon travels around the country to understand its intricacies, its vulnerabilities and the remarkable ingenuity required to keep the power on every day. At New York State's governing grid control room, he learns how a massive blackout cut power to 40 million Americans and joins a live wire repair team who do their daring repairs from the side of a helicopter in flight. He also visits the country's largest coal mine, rappels down the side of wind turbine, takes a rare tour of a nuclear plant and travels on a massive tanker — where Kwon reflects on the challenges and opportunities we face now and in the days ahead to keep the power flowing.

Contrary to recent widely held beliefs, America is actually the number one manufacturing nation on earth. Yul Kwon meets the men and women who create the world's best and most iconic products; engineers who are reinventing the American auto industry; steelworkers who brave intense heat to accommodate radical new ideas about recycling; and engineers who are re-imagining the microchip. Yul further explores the emerging notion that manufacturing itself is changing from a system based on the movement and assembly of raw materials like steel and plastic to a system in which ideas and information are the raw materials of a new economy based around communications and social connections via companies like Facebook and Google.