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[email protected]. Engineering On the Road Henry Petroski n 1919 Dwight D. Eisenhower, days. The first woman to drive across Ithen a young lieutenant colonel The Interstate the country was Alice Huyler Ramsey, in the U.S. Army, rode in a convoy of who with three other women in her military vehicles that traveled from green Maxwell made it from New York Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. It Highway System to San Francisco in only 41 days in 1909. was the service’s first transcontinental The idea for a transcontinental road, journey by motor vehicle, and the pur- turns 50 this year as opposed to a transcontinental trip, pose of the exercise was to promote was put forward in 1913 by Carl Gra- the army’s Motor Transport Corps ham Fisher, builder of a motor speed- and demonstrate its defense mobility. way on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Almost 300 enlisted men and officers faster than a brisk walk. Although ex- Fisher argued at the time that Amer- rode by motorcycle, car and truck in a cruciatingly slow by today’s standards, ica’s highways were “built chiefly of caravan that stretched for three miles. it was the best that the caravan could politics,” when the “proper material is Vehicles were draped with bunting of do at the time.