I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks that felt like line noise to me.

It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship.

Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.