4 February

Henry Ford is famous for having said that his customers could have any colour they liked for their Model Ts, so long as it was black. There was a reason for that. Firstly Model Ts began in a range of colours, but when he built the factory to mass-produce them the greatest logjam was the painting. He could assemble the cars in about 12 hours. But it took days or even weeks for the multiple coats of paint to be applied and to dry. He had thousands of drying cars sitting in warehouses. Restricting the paint to one colour sped this up a little, but also he used tar in the paint, which was hard to make anything except black.