Chapter 14
Promoting tires since 1898, Bibendum, aka the Michelin Man, was born at the Universal and Colonial Exhibition in Lyon, France, in 1894. Eyeing two pillars of tires stacked in front of his company’s booth, Edouard Michelin, depicted in this 1890s cartoon, suggested to his brother Andre, “Give it some arms and legs and it would look like a man.”
Within a few years, his idea developed into the mummy-like mascot we know today. In 1898, Andre was contemplating an advertising sketch drawn by the famed illustrator O’Galop (the pen name of Marius Rossillon) for a Munich brewery portraying a bearded King Gambrinus, the “patron saint” of beer hoisting a tankard of the yeasty beverage. It occurred to the savvy Andre that this imbibing Atlas could be morphed into a humanoid mascot composed of tires, the way his brother had envisioned. Hired by the brothers to create the mascot and transform the advocate for beer into a shill for a tire company, O’Galop drew the character a chalky white, reflecting the natural color of rubber up until the preservative carbon black was added to tires during their manufacture, rendering them the now-familiar ebony shade.
The Michelin brothers also decided to recycle the Latin quotation from the O’Galop beer-ad poster. “Nunc est Bibendum” (“Now it is time to drink”). The inspiration for the quote came from the skilled satirist and writer of odes, Horace, who had placed the phrase “Nunc est Bibendum” in Mark Antony’s mouth after the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE. The line was adopted not out of a politically incorrect laissez faire attitude about operating heavy machinery under the influence, but because of a tagline that had been used by Michelin since 1893: “C’est à dire: À votre santé. Le pneu Michelin boit l’obstacle!” (“That is to say: To your health. The Michelin tire drinks up obstacles!”).
The rotund talisman’s name came about by an accidental baptism. At the 1898 Paris–Amsterdam–Paris race, the race driver Léon Théry shouted, “Voila Bibendum, vive Bibendum,” mixing the words from the poster with the mascot on it, and thus christened it. Then, combining Horace’s 2,000-year-old phrase with the nineteenth-century cartoon, the mascot became popularly known as the “road drunkard,” a perception that would ignite a public relations debacle today.
Bibendum came alive for the first time at a Parisian cycle show in 1898. Sequestered behind a large cardboard cutout of the Michelin Man in the company’s booth was a cabaret comedian who charmed attendees by voicing Bibendum’s witty banter. The ensuing crowds pissed off rival exhibitors, creating a melee police eventually had to break up.
Courtesy of Michelin North America Inc.
Bibendum lacked the mascot-of-the-people appeal of later commercial figures such as Charlie the Tuna, the Pillsbury Doughboy, or even the Kool-Aid Man. Indeed, many of Michelin’s posters from the early twentieth century depict him as a kind of Scrooge McDuck with a health-threatening BMI. Bibendum was a moneyed mogul, an aristo complete with an “Arthur”-like glass of champagne often in hand, a smoldering Havana cigar in its open wound of a mouth, and pince-nez glasses with which to cast a wary eye on his inferiors. Rather than alienating potential customers with his Grey Poupon pretensions, Bibendum reflected the wealthier automotive buyer of the day (embodied in exhibitions such as the 1900 New York Auto Show, where exhibits displayed chauffeurs testing the emerging transportation). Promotional materials appealed to the patrician impulse by noting the “king of tires and the tire of kings” was owned by the crowned heads of Britain, Belgium, Russia, and Germany. In 1905, after Michelin opened a sales office in London, the company produced an ad in which Bibendum, wearing a helmet and carrying a shield, has just stepped away from an Arthurian Round Table. His spectacles, cup, cigar, and a cross-section of a Michelin tire with a nail incapable of piercing it, served as his coat of arms. The caption, which was as English as bulldogs, drew on a line from Tennyson, “My strength is as the strength of ten, because my rubber is pure.”
As malleable as rubber itself, the Michelin Man adapted to commercial surfaces of all textures, no matter how foreign they may have been. In Germany and the Scandinavian lands, he sported cold-weather gear. In Japan, he appeared with a hefty sumo-like profile. In others, he affected the look of a Bedouin. Bibendum’s fame crossed over into the curious immortalization popular culture offered, with versions of him appearing in the comic book series “Asterix” as a chariot-wheel dealer, and in the Oscar-winning animated short “Logorama” as multiple law-enforcement figures pursuing a villainous Ronald McDonald. In the 1958 autobiography “The Mist Procession” by Lord Vansittart, an aging Sir Winston Churchill, no stranger to padded corpulence, is compared by the author to the Michelin Man. Even science-fiction writer William Gibson referenced Bibendum in the novel “Pattern Recognition.”
Today, Michelin—properly, the Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin SCA—rolls along down the road, a $21 billion company with 112,300 employees and 68 production plants in 17 different countries. Its eponymous travel guides (the first was released in 1900, with 35,000 copies given away free for the Exposition Universelle in Paris) now cover almost 30 cities, including Shanghai.
“Pale Death beats equally at the poor man’s gate and at the palaces of kings,” wrote Horace of “Nunc est Bibendum” fame. But not at Bibendum’s kingdom. In a 2000 competition sponsored by the Financial Times and the Canadian magazine Report on Business, Bibendum was voted the “greatest logo in history,” running over competition that included the London Underground, Red Cross, and IBM logos. Nearly 120 years after its birth, Bibendum remains the king of the road.