Congratulations go out to Alexis Madrigal on the sale of his book The History of Our Future: the Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Green Tech Visionaries.  After an exciting, intense auction with four major publishers bidding, the book went to Bob Pigeon over at Da Capo (part of the Perseus Group).

Green tech has become a keystone of President Obama’s plan to remake America, and with even infamous oilmen like T. Boone Pickens spending his own money on television ads to pitch his version of our green tech future, the shift to a country that runs on clean, green energy sounds almost inevitable. But is it?

The History of Our Future will be the first book to tell the incredible, forgotten history of green tech innovation in the United States. Few today realize that electric cabs dominated Manhattan’s streets in the 1890s; that Boise, Idaho had a geothermal heating system in 1910; or that the first megawatt turbine in the world was built back in 1941 by Palmer Putnam, the son of publishing magnate G.P. Putnam, a feat that wouldn’t be duplicated for nearly 40 years; or that the oil embargo in the 1970s that lead to oil and natural gas prices that still haven’t been eclipsed, also lead to an explosion in green technology research that later became derailed when energy prices went down.

In other words: we’ve been here before and each time we’ve had a chance to put our world on a more sustainable path we’ve failed. Now we face a similar situation, when energy prices are low and financial pressure is high. Could the same short-sighted approach that doomed earlier green tech innovation – and which crashed not only Wall Street, but the entire worldwide economy – also bust this latest green tech boom?

Half compendium of lost opportunities, half hopeful look to the future, The History of Our Future will tell the stories of the brilliant, often irascible inventors who foresaw our current problems and tried to invent solutions. These are stories of people taking on larger than life challenges and accomplishing incredible technological feats in the pursuit of wealth and for the thrill of doing something totally, utterly new, but until now they’ve been left out of our shared history.

Alexis Madrigal’s “Wired Science” blog over at Wired.com is the 25th most linked-to blog in the world and the #1 science blog in the world. He has also been recognized by The Aspen Institute for his pioneering use of Twitter, and has been invited to speak at South by Southwest, Stanford Law School, and Berkeley Journalism School. Alexis has also appeared on NPR’s The Takeaway and Bryant Park Project, and has been interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, BBC and Current TV.