The chapter opens with the discovery of penicillin: Alexander Fleming notices mold killing staphylococcus in 1928, but the breakthrough stalls. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later prove penicillin can save infected mice, yet by 1941 human results are limited and deadly, showing that a famous “eureka” can still amount to almost nothing without follow-through.

Klein argues the “eureka theory of history” misleads because progress depends on implementation—turning an idea from “one to one billion.” He illustrates how the U.S. often invents but struggles to deploy: American elevators become overengineered and costly; the U.S. pioneered nuclear and solar but fell behind; and a U.S.-developed LFP battery technology ended up being manufactured at scale in China.

Returning to penicillin, the narrative shows how U.S. wartime state capacity converted discovery into mass benefit. Under Roosevelt’s wartime innovation system and Vannevar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Committee on Medical Research identified bottlenecks (chemistry, contamination, and production), standardized processes, funded factories through the War Production Board, ran clinical trials, and organized distribution through selected hospitals. Scale drove costs down dramatically, and penicillin reshaped medicine and survival in war and civilian life.

The chapter then traces a parallel lesson through solar power: Bell Labs created the first practical solar cell in 1954, and U.S. government demand (space) and 1970s policy support rapidly improved cost and efficiency. Reagan-era cuts and policy whiplash helped collapse momentum, while Germany built a market through subsidies and China made panels cheap through sustained support and manufacturing scale, reflecting Wright’s law: building more teaches you how to build cheaper and better.

Klein reframes government’s role by rejecting the notion that markets alone deploy breakthrough technologies. Operation Warp Speed becomes a modern example of “bottleneck detective” governance: it spread bets across platforms, accelerated trials and FDA review, expanded manufacturing facilities, solved supply-chain constraints (like ultracold glass vials), coordinated distribution logistics, and bought doses so vaccines were free. Despite immense benefits, the program becomes politically orphaned, and Klein argues the correct lesson is that focused, pragmatic government can speed invention and deployment.

Finally, Klein generalizes the approach: identify the specific constraints of each sector; remove needless restrictions (such as limits on medical training capacity); and use smarter tools like pull funding and advance market commitments to reduce demand uncertainty, illustrated by a pneumococcal vaccine deal and potential applications in carbon removal and clean cement. He warns that AI’s energy hunger makes clean-energy deployment a central national bottleneck and concludes that “focus is a choice”: crises can concentrate priorities, but leaders can also define crises and choose to build what America invents.