One February morning, the President of the United States called Thomas H. MacDonald, the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, into the White House to broach an idea: It seemed to him, the president said, that the U.S. might benefit from a system of high-speed superhighways crisscrossing the country. With that, he handed MacDonald a map on which he’d drawn six blue lines—three crossing the 48 states from coast to coast, and three running North-South from the Canadian border to Mexico or the Gulf. Study whether such a grid of highways could be built, he said, and whether there’s a way we could make it pay for itself.

That meeting marked the moment of conception for the 47,000-mile Interstate Highway System, which was destined to redraw the national map, reorder America’s cities, and remake our notions of time, speed and distance. Over the next several months, MacDonald’s bureau concluded that the president’s six highways could not be financed through tolls—in fact, no configuration of long-distance expressways would support itself.

The bureau instead proposed a more ambitious web of highways in and between cities, arguing that it might not only ease the country’s worsening urban traffic, but replace its slums. Voila: We had a rough blueprint for today’s Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

Thing is, that White House meeting took place in 1938. Eisenhower was in the Philippines at the time, working for Douglas MacArthur. He wouldn’t take the oath of office for another 15 years.

The guy who drew those lines on the map was Franklin Roosevelt.

[As noted in the comments, a Pershing Map proposing national highways preceded FDR's interstate conception]