Fads.

Americans in the antebellum decades exhibited a mania for whatever trend promised to reduce to manageable proportions the nation's vast distances and long communication gaps. Obsessed with speed, hating isolation, yet tired of long and uncomfortable journeys and letters that took weeks or months to reach their destinations, ordinary Americans found potential salvation in each new transportation technology. The railroad and the telegraph satiated their appetite for a while, capturing the national imagination for most of the nineteenth century (before the telephone and the automobile started the whole process going again), but not before one last craze swept the country: a mania for wooden roads. From the late 1840s until the business depression of 1857 Americans invested some $10 million in more than seven thousand miles of plank roads concentrated mostly in New York and the Midwest, an investment which literally rotted away before...