I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.
I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)?
There was just a long Derek Thompson podcast with a Transcontinental Railroad scholar about this! (That's why I knew about it.)
The whole subtext of that podcast was how eerily similar the Transcontinental Railroad was to AI (as an investment/malinvestment/prediction of future trends).
