Henry Ford? Edward Menge? Lewis Mumford? Sedgewick Seti? Apocryphal?
Dear Quote Investigator: The preeminent automotive industrialist Henry Ford is credited with a saying that has become very popular in the business literature:
If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.
But I can find no good evidence that Ford ever said this. It’s a great line, though, and I am curious to know who came up with it.
Quote Investigator: The earliest instance of this quotation that QI has located appeared in a letter sent to the UK publication Marketing Week in 2001 [HFMW]:
Being market-led implies being led by the consumer — and consumers are bad at coming up with innovations (Henry Ford’s quote: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse” springs to mind…)
Yet Henry Ford died in 1947, so the evidence connecting him to the quotation appears to be very weak. On the other hand, Henry Ford’s great-grandson William Clay Ford Jr. used the remark in 2006 and indicated that the attribution was accurate.
Decades before the 2001 citation the core of the concept embodied in the saying was discussed in a scientific periodical titled “The Quarterly Review of Biology” in 1930. The author, Edward J. v. K. Menge, contrasted different methods to achieve scientific and technological progress. He contended that incremental extensions of existing ideas sometimes did not lead to significant progress. Instead, major developments occurred when new principles were discovered and applied [QRBP]:
But merely extending knowledge a step further is not developing science. Breeding homing pigeons that could cover a given space with ever increasing rapidity did not give us the laws of telegraphy, nor did breeding faster horses bring us the steam locomotive.
The quotation that is credited to Ford emphasized the futility of breeding faster horses to obtain automobiles, but this 1930 quotation pointed to the mature transportation vehicle of its era, the locomotive. This earlier saying also did not mention misguided customers, yet it is still an intriguing precursor.
Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.