Herman Gerling. Barrels on truck are for hauling water. Near Wheelock, North Dakota

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.

Russell grew up in Ottawa, Illinois and went to the Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He gave up a position as a chemist to become a painter and used photography as a precursor to his painting, but soon became interested in photography as media. His earliest subjects were Pennsylvanian bootleg mining and the Father Divine cult. In the fall of 1936, during the Great Depression, Lee was hired for the federally sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic documentation project of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He joined a team assembled under Roy Stryker, along with Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans. Lee created some of the iconic images produced by the FSA, including photographic studies of San Augustine, Texas in 1939, and Pie Town, New Mexico in 1940. Over the spring and summer of 1942, Lee was one of several government photographers to document the eviction of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, producing over 600 images of families waiting to be removed and their later life in various detention facilities.

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!