Mercury Through The Years...

**Lake X Kid** · 11-29-2019, 09:57 PM

Charlie Strang said his mother is the reason why Mercury motors are now painted black. Back when Mercury was coming out with the 1000 Mercury, the prototype paint scheme was a white motor with silver and black trim. Carl Kiekhaefer, when viewing the prototype, thought the motor looked too big and bulky in white. Charlie told his mother about Carl's comments, and Charlie's mother commented back that women sometimes wear black dresses to look a lot slimmer, why not paint the motor black?

Carl liked the idea, so Charlie had one of the new Mercs repainted black. Carl loved the slimming effect of the motor in black and ordered the paint scheme to be changed to black for all future Mercury outboard motors.

Why Mercury Motors are painted Black; link.
http://www.quincylooperracing.us/subpage84.html

**Mark75H** · 11-29-2019, 10:15 PM

It was in Iron Fist long before Paul started the web page; and if it was in Iron Fist, it was in a magazine article that Rodengen wrote long before the book.

**Robby321** · 11-29-2019, 10:35 PM

Black motor fine for slim, "but"? (Thank God not Vertical!)

It’s a common belief that if you want to appear slimmer than you actually are, you should wear clothes with vertical stripes. The classical pinstriped business suit would be an example of this sort of clothing hiding a few extra pounds.
It turns out that this folk belief is fundamentally wrong. A square composed of horizontal lines appears taller and narrower than an identical square made up of vertical lines.

Copyright: Berit Brogaard

This illusion was discovered by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1925, and is also known as the Helmholtz illusion. Helmholtz’s explanation of the illusion was that a filled out area looks longer than an unfilled area of the same size. His thought was that the figure with horizontal stripes looks filled and hence longer from bottom up, whereas the square with vertical lines looks filled and hence longer from left to right. This then generates the illusion that the square with horizontal lines is taller and slimmer than the same-sized square with vertical stripes, which looks short and fat.