Ferry EUREKA, Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA

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.

Commercial Auto Sales Catalogs

We at GetArchive are exploring new methods of image metadata augmentation and verification. Our goal is to make it possible to find images on any topic. In particular, we are trying to verify and fix historic periodization. This collection is made of historic photographs of automobiles that look as if they were taken in the 1940s. The collection is made with aid of a neural image recognition network dealing with the whole image composition rather than with the car model - some cars may be dated incorrectly. Although, while this method is surprisingly good for the purpose of dating and tagging, a certain percentage of images (less than 8%) may not represent automobile, but other vehicle type or visually similar object. Naturally, our next step should be creating numerous datasets for a particular car years&models, but as of September 2022, we found no use to justify the effort.

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!