Was built with no options. One wiper, one sun visor, one (left) taillight, no heater, no outside mirrors. The turn signals work great, as long as you go to the trouble of cranking the window down so you can stick your arm out. The wiper switch is technically a valve, which connects the wiper mechanism to the intake manifold. As Angus J notes, you control wiper speed with the accelerator.

As a kid I remember riding in cars that were so old that while they had two wipers, the one on the passenger side was manual. The driver's side had the old style vacuum wiper, which as the car accelerated would cause the wiper to slow down. I see this truck has a left side mirror, but none on the right side. When I learned to drive, our 1963 Falcon had no outside mirrors at all. In 1969, when I started my job as a trolley bus driver, Vancouver buses had no right side mirrors. Compare that to today's vehicles with rear view backup camera displays.

My volunteer fire department's 1942 GMC has wipers on both sides but they each have their own on/off switch so the passenger was responsible for turning it on themselves if they wanted to see.

This was almost undoubtedly taken at the 20-acre plant propagation area created for the fair at San Francisco's Balboa Park. From the fair's site on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay there'd be no view of nearby treeless hills like those in the photo.

How long was it before vehicle manufacturers decided to install windshield wipers on both sides of the front windshields? Was it because they felt that only one wiper, on the driver's side, was necessary because it had to be operated manually by the driver, or is that not a correct assumption? Frankly, it is totally unsafe to have but a single wiper! Was it a matter of economy during the manufacturing process or were the vehicle engineers just totally oblivious to this safety hazard?

[I hestitate to guess how shocked you'll be to learn that there was a time when most cars had a total of zero wipers! -Dave]