The line is real and its source is solid — but Ford didn’t say it. It appears verbatim in Sarah T. Bushnell’s 1922 biography The Truth About Henry Ford, spoken by a banker whom Ford’s lawyer Horace Rackham consulted about buying Ford Motor Company stock. Ford is the man the prediction was wrong about, not the man who made it. Bushnell names the speaker only as “a leading banker.”
“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad” an unnamed "leading banker," advising Horace Rackham against investing in the Ford Motor Company, c. 1903. Not said by Henry Ford. Recorded in Sarah T. Bushnell, The Truth About Henry Ford (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1922), 55–57.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Henry Ford. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Evoking the world of Sarah T. Bushnell — author of The Truth About Henry Ford (Reilly & Lee, 1922). Theme: "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The 1922 book that is the only source
Source
The Truth About Henry Ford
Author & imprint
Sarah T. Bushnell · Reilly & Lee Co., Chicago, 1922
Pages
55–57 (chapter, “The First Car and the First Race”)
Speaker
An unnamed “leading banker,” Detroit, c. 1903
Mr. Rackham’s case was different. He lived only two doors from the Ford home and had a nodding acquaintance with the inventor, but his health was poor and he could not afford to speculate with his savings. So he went to a leading banker for advice.
The banker took him to a window. “Look,” he said pointing to the street. “You see all those people on their bicycles riding along the boulevard? There is not as many as there was a year ago. The novelty is wearing off; they are losing interest. That’s just the way it will be with automobiles. People will get the fever; and later they will throw them away. My advice is not to buy the stock. You might make money for a year or two, but in the end you would lose everything you put in. The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.”
Mr. Rackham was convinced. But a few days later he met Mr. Malcomson who showed him facts and figures and talked eloquently. Rackham was convinced again — but the other way.
pp. 55–57
Transcribed from the scanned 1922 printing at the Internet Archive. The grammar of “There is not as many as there was a year ago” is as printed.
1896 — The phrase itself was already a rural stock sentiment. Quote Investigator finds The Wisconsin Farmer (1 May 1896) printing “The horse is here to stay” against the competition of bikes and trolley cars — years before any automobile conversation. Quote Investigator’s citation trail ↗
1922 — Sarah T. Bushnell’s The Truth About Henry Ford prints the full anecdote and the exact wording, attributing it to “a leading banker” consulted by Horace Rackham around 1903. This remains the earliest and only documented source. Verify it in the scan ↗
1984 — Cerf and Navasky’s The Experts Speak sharpens the anonymous banker into “President of the Michigan Savings Bank.” Quote Investigator states plainly that it does not know the source of that more precise identification. QI on the 1984 upgrade ↗
Today — The Michigan Savings Bank version is now the standard telling and appears in Wikipedia’s entry on Rackham, while the line drifts further into Ford’s own quote file. Wikipedia: Horace Rackham ↗
✓Public domain
The wording is fixed in The Truth About Henry Ford, first published in Chicago by Reilly & Lee in 1922 — comfortably before 1931, so the book is in the public domain in the United States. The Internet Archive’s scan, digitised from the Library of Congress copy, notes that the Library is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the item ↗. No translation is involved; the book was written in English.
Fact-check
Two things go wrong with this quote
This is an unusual case: the quotation is genuine and its source is airtight, but almost everything people attach to it — the speaker, his job, and his bank — is either inverted or invented. The errors run in opposite directions.
✕
The speakerHenry Ford Inverted
Ford is the one name that cannot belong on this line. In Bushnell’s text the banker is arguing against buying stock in Ford’s company; the whole point of the anecdote is that the prediction was catastrophically wrong about Ford. The quote drifts onto him only because the story survives inside a Ford biography and every retelling says his name. Ford’s own museum warns that this is exactly how his quote file fills up: “Too often, a quote is attributed to Ford simply because its touches upon success in business or innovation” ↗.
✕
The banker’s identity“The President of the Michigan Savings Bank” Over-precise
✓The honest version: an unnamed Detroit banker, around 1903, talked Henry Ford’s lawyer out of buying Ford stock — briefly. The only evidence is three pages of Sarah T. Bushnell’s 1922 biography ↗. Everything more specific than “a leading banker” is later embroidery.
Context
Why the story stuck
The quote endures because of what happened next. Horace Rackham took the banker’s advice, thought better of it within days, sold some real estate, and handed Alexander Malcomson $5,000 with the words — in Bushnell’s telling — “Here, take this money and buy the stock before I have time to change my mind again.”
That $5,000 bought 50 shares. Rackham sold them to the Fords in 1919 for $12.5 million. Bushnell’s book closes the anecdote on exactly that figure: the two lawyers “each man held his stock, selling it finally for twelve and one-half million dollars.” The banker’s window — with its thinning traffic of bicycles — became the most expensive view in American business folklore.
He was not wrong about bicycles. He was wrong about what the bicycles meant.
Read the full story
The banker’s reasoning is more interesting than its punchline. He was extrapolating from a real phenomenon: the American bicycle boom of the 1890s had genuinely crested, and he read the automobile as the same appetite in a new shell. That is a defensible pattern-match. It was also the wrong one — the bicycle had been a novelty; the automobile was infrastructure.
It is worth noting that the sentiment was not original to him either. Quote Investigator traces “The horse is here to stay” back to The Wisconsin Farmer in 1896, where it reassured farmers about bikes and trolley cars. The banker was reaching for a phrase already in the air, which is part of why it sounds so quotable.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
American biographer · author of The Truth About Henry Ford (Reilly & Lee, 1922)
Sarah Terrill Bushnell wrote The Truth About Henry Ford, published in Chicago by Reilly & Lee in 1922 — an admiring, access-driven biography written while Ford was at the height of his fame. Her book is the only known source for this quotation. Quote Investigator suggests Rackham likely told her the anecdote himself; she recorded the banker’s speech in full but never gave his name, and no one since has documented who he was.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Sarah T. Bushnell, The Truth About Henry Ford (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1922), 55–57. Earliest and only documented appearance; the speaker is identified only as “a leading banker.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-horse-is-here-to-stay-but-the-automobile-is-only-a