The old adage that “history is written by the winners” can also be slightly revised to say “history is written of the winners”. For every success there were, of course, hundreds of failures, most of which were never written about. Still some examples of remain, teaching lessons just as important as those of successes. One of the better known examples is of the Ford Edsel, built by the Ford Motor Company to compete with GM’s Oldsmobile.

On this day, September 4, in 1957, during the much hyped-up “E-Day” Ford finally introduced their Edsel. Rather than creating a flurry of buying among the consumers, however, it mostly created a flurry of confusion.

Until its debut in the dealerships, the Edsel was never shown. The only advertisements for it conceal it behind objects or blurred it out. Customers that finally saw it, expecting something extraordinarily new, were disappointed — although it featured a number of under-the-hood innovations, externally the Edsel was quite conventional, if not downright ugly. Then there was the matter of pricing — the way it was set up among Ford’s models, customers were unsure whether the Edsel was a step above the Mercury brand or a step below. One Ford executive euphemistically summed it up: “The aim was right, but the target moved”.