Henry T. Ford

[pleasehelpme]

According to QI, Ford didnt actually say ' You can have any colour so long as it' black' is this true and can it be verified?
Thanks in advance.

[kempie]

The following quote is from the book My Life and Work, by Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, published in 1922...

'Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to be "Model T," and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and I remarked:

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production.'


The text of this book is available here...

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10. txt

[Toureman]

It has never been proved that he said that...........

http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1908/mo del.t.html

[kempie]

...but it proves that he wrote it in a book in 1922.

[jno]

so how would you 'prove' he said it? If the people he supposedly said it to confirmed or denied it, that might help; but given that they're doubtless long dead, we have only his word for it. Any reason for doubting his word?

[WaldoMcFroog]

Incidentally, perhaps you'd like to do a search for that particular phrase (or indeed the preceeding paragraph) in the text provided by Gutenberg...

Any spelling of colour/color, you like, it's not in there.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Ahem... It is in there. Apologies!

My excuse it that I was using the 'find' function with the whole quote, and because there are line breaks in the txt file, it doesn't find the search string.

I stand by what I wrote on the other thread, however: http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/History/Questio n452143.html

"He may have written that he said it, but since for the first year of production, 1909, the Model T Ford came in grey, red or Brewster's green (apparently!) only, it seems highly unlikely. "