4th July, George Grantham Bain Collection

The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1890s. Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry after WWI. Throughout this initial era, the development of automotive technology was rapid. Hundreds of small manufacturers competing to gain the world's attention. Key developments included the electric ignition system, independent suspension, and four-wheel brakes. Transmissions and throttle controls were widely adopted and safety glass also made its debut. Henry Ford perfected mass-production techniques, and Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler emerged as the “Big Three” auto companies by the 1920s. Car manufacturers received enormous orders from the military during World War II, and afterward automobile production in the United States, Europe, and Japan soared.

The Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company was created on January 13, 1916, from the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York and Curtiss Motor Company of Bath, New York. With the onset of World War I, military orders rose sharply, and the company moved its headquarters and most manufacturing activities to Buffalo, New York, where there was far greater access to transportation, manpower, manufacturing expertise, and much-needed capital. In 1917, the two major aircraft patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association. Curtiss was instrumental in the development of U.S. Naval Aviation by providing training for pilots and providing aircraft. The Company worked with the United States' British and Canadian allies. By the end of World War I, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company would claim to be the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world, employing 18,000 in Buffalo and 3,000 in Hammondsport, New York. Curtiss produced 10,000 aircraft during that war, and more than 100 in a single week.

This collection is made of historic photographs of trucks that belong to the period before the end of World War I. Like every similar Picryl collection, this image set is made with aid of neural network image recognition. A manually picked dataset to train the machine was required first. Once trained, the AI made it possible to go through millions of images to find possible matches. Without this, extensive multi-sourced topical collections would be impossible to create. The image tagging process requires quality control to get rid of false-positive matches. Without human oversight, in this set, there would be false positive things on wheels such as carried artillery, horse carriages, and so on. GetArchive's goal is to deliver relevant results for every meaningful search request. Right now we collected 25 Million images to go through - please donate or subscribe to help us to accelerate this process!