From simple barnside advertisements and other billboarding techniques of the early 1900s, to today's huge high-tech creations on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, billboards and outdoor advertising have been an integral part of both the landscape and the consciousness of America since the evolution of the American car culture of the early twentieth century.

Like many twentieth-century phenomena, the modern advertising spectacle, which the French have termed gigantisme, actually dates back to ancient times and the great obelisks of Egypt. By the late 1400s billboarding, or the mounting of promotional posters in conspicuous public places, had become an accepted practice in Europe. Wide-scale visual advertising came into its own with the invention of lithography in 1796, and by 1870 was further advanced by the technological progress of the Industrial Revolution.

A billboard in Birmingham, Alabama, 1937.

In America early advertising techniques were relatively naive, involving melodramatic situations, body ills, hygiene, and testimonials...