It’s unlikely that we would even refer metaphorically to buggy whip makers if it weren’t for Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor. In 1960, he wrote about their plight in a Harvard Business Review article, “Marketing Myopia”; hundreds of thousands of reprints have been sold.

In the article, Mr. Levitt said that businesses should concentrate on their customers’ needs, not on specific products. If only the buggy whip makers had thought of themselves as being in the personal transportation business, providing a stimulant or catalyst to an energy source, Mr. Levitt wrote, they might have survived into the automotive era.

But Mr Levitt’s suggestion that only a failure of imagination kept the whip business from jumping to the automotive business seems historically ungrounded. I spoke recently about buggy whips with Thomas A. Kinney, an assistant professor of history at Bluefield College in Virginia and author of “The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America.”

There were 13,000 businesses in the wagon and carriage industry in 1890, Mr. Kinney said. A company survived not by conceiving of itself as being in the “personal transportation” business, but by commanding technological expertise relevant to the automobile, he said. “The people who made the most successful transition were not the carriage makers, but the carriage parts makers,” he said, some of whom are still in business.

Image Those who disparage buggies as a dead end forget Studebaker switched from carriages to cars. Credit... Collection of Studebaker National Museum, South Bend, Ind.

One is the giant Timken Company, whose signature products, roller bearings, were first used in wagon wheels in the 1890s. They easily adapted to the automobile because they could be applied “to nearly anything that moved,” Mr. Kinney wrote.