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Today is the birthday of the Interstate Highway system. On June 29, 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act became law.

They say that success had many fathers. That's true for the Interstate system, but it's named the Eisenhower Interstate System for a reason. As President, Dwight Eisenhower pushed hard for the legislation because he had a vision of how it would change travel.

In 1919, then-Major Eisenhower was an observer on a truck convoy that travelled from Washington DC to San Francisco. The War Department was testing whether trucks could be used to move goods quickly across the US.

It was a reasonable question. There were a lot of people who thought that a trip like that was impossible. Most roads weren't paved. That meant that when it rained, many turned into impassable mud-pits. Trucks and cars weren't very sophisticated or reliable, either.

On the first day, July 7, the convoy managed 46 miles in a little over seven hours. There were three breakdowns.

They got farther on the second day. That day they covered 62 miles in ten and a half hours. It was some of the best progress of the trip because the weather was good and many of the roads were paved. It took 61 days to get to San Francisco.

That memory drove President Eisenhower to enable the construction of high speed roads that could be used for military transport. We got that, but we got more, too.

We got massive changes in the US landscape and society. I remember vacation trips to Lake George in the mid-1950s as an adventure very different from today.

The trip was over what we would now call "back roads." We could only travel during the day. There were no filling stations open all night. We took our food with us, because we could never be sure what restaurants would be open along our route.

Small towns then were pretty much isolated from each other. Many of them did not have a hotel.

The Interstate Highway system changed that, along with many other things. But those changes weren't part of the original plan. They happened because lots of different people saw opportunities created by the Interstate System and set about seizing them.

Gas stations sprang up at strategic Interstate exits. Fast food restaurants joined them. Hotels and motels followed.

Just like when the railroads extended their tentacles across the country a century earlier, some towns thrived when the Interstate brought travelers to the edge of town. Other towns withered and some died as the Interstate went by a few miles away.

The system was supposed to cost $25 billion and take 12 years to complete. Instead the dollar figure is more like $114 billion for the highways that were planned originally. The last part of the originally planned system was completed in 1992, 36 years after the legislation became law.

Today, the project is not done. New Interstate Highways are planned and (mostly) built. The Interstate Highway system has become a kind of living thing.

Boss's Bottom Lines

Most great innovations come into being because of the innovator's personal experience.

If you create something special, it will outlive you. That's a good thing, even if they don't put your name on it.

Great innovations spawn other innovations. You cannot guess or control what they will be. Neither can anyone else.

No matter what the planners and accountants tell you, a project will cost more and take longer than originally projected. Lots more. Lots longer. You cannot do anything about this, but you do have to live with it.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.