What is the "Michelin Man"?

Ever wondered, pondered what on earth the Michelin Man actual is? Is he a man, is he a bunch of tires stacked upon one another? I even thought he might be tire tubes laid one on top of another. As my husband and I were watching tv this morning and a Michelin Tire commercial came on we pondered, "what is the Michelin Man"? So I thought I'd get to the bottom of this mystery. I know this sounds pathetic :) but why not get to the bottom of things and get off the couch and exercise my brain :) I love a good mystery. Apparently according to the web this is what he is and how he came to be:

The Michelin Man was anything but cuddly in his earliest incarnations. He had a frightful, mummy-like aspect then, and sometimes appeared as a gladiator or a kickboxer. In the Italian market he was a grandiloquent memoirist, a nimble ballroom dancer, and an incorrigible ladies' man. Stranger still, back then he was known as the "road drunkard." To this day his official name is Bibendum, the Latin gerundive meaning "drinking to be done." The name comes from the first series of posters featuring him, which bore the Latin legend Nunc est bibendum--"Now is the time to drink"--and depicted the tire man hoisting a champagne goblet filled with nails and broken glass, sometimes garnished with a horseshoe. The seemingly tortured conceit, as the ad copy spelled out, was that "Michelin tires drink up obstacles"--i.e., they wouldn't puncture easily.

Yet what sounds today like a preposterously ill- advised advertising campaign made keen good sense at its moment in cultural history. And the quirkiness of Bibendum's origins is part of what inspires such loyalty among his fans today.

In 1889 the brothers André and Édouard Michelin took control of a struggling rubber products business in Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city in central France. According to the company's official history, a bicyclist came to their workshop in 1889 with a flat tire. Pneumatic (inflatable) tires had just been invented by John Boyd Dunlop the year before. Pneumatics provided a much more comfortable ride than the alternative--solid rubber tires--but they were subject to punctures, especially since roads were so poor. In fixing the flat, the brothers discovered that the customer's Dunlops were glued to the rims, making patches extremely time-consuming. They soon developed and patented a detachable pneumatic tire that could be repaired in 15 minutes or so. Next they pioneered pneumatic tires for carriages, and by 1895 an early automobile known as the Éclair (it looked like one) completed a 750-mile race on Michelin tires.

During this period Bibendum was in gestation. His first kick in the womb came in 1893 when André argued to the skeptical Paris Society of Civil Engineers that pneumatic tires could "drink up obstacles." Fetal Bibendum kicked again in 1894, when Édouard motioned to stacks of tires at an auto exposition in Lyon and commented to André, "Add some arms, and you'd say they were men."

Then, in 1897, while thumbing through a commercial artist's portfolio, André had a fateful epiphany. It was triggered by a sketch that had been rejected by a Munich brewery, showing a legendary king hoisting a stein and uttering a Latin toast. André told the artist, who went by the pen name O'Galop, to substitute a tire man for the king. In O'Galop's final version, completed in April 1898, Bibendum is flanked by two tattered, flaccid rivals who couldn't hold their rusty nails. To contemporaries, the competitors' caricatured faces were readily recognizable as those of John Boyd Dunlop and the then-chief of Continental Tire.

If Bibendum was made of tires, the reader may ask, why wasn't he black? Simple answer: Tires weren't black until 1912, when makers first began adding carbon black as a preservative. Until then they were either a gray-white or a light, translucent beige.

A bit of trivia for you!