Michelin

Michelin (; ; full name: ) is a French multinational tyre manufacturing company based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes région of France. It is the second largest tyre manufacturer in the world behind Bridgestone and larger than both Goodyear and Continental. In addition to the Michelin brand, it also owns the Kléber tyres company, Uniroyal-Goodrich Tire Company, SASCAR, Bookatable and Camso brands. Michelin is also notable for its Red and Green travel guides, its roadmaps, the Michelin stars that the Red Guide awards to restaurants for their cooking, and for its company mascot Bibendum, colloquially known as the Michelin Man, who is a humanoid consisting of tyres. Michelin's numerous inventions include the removable tyre, the pneurail (a tyre for rubber-tyred metros) and the radial tyre. Michelin manufactures tyres for Space Shuttles, aircraft, automobiles, heavy equipment, motorcycles, and bicycles. In 2012, the group produced 166 million tyres at 69 facilities located in 18 countries. History In 1889, two brothers, Édouard Michelin (1859–1940) and André Michelin (1853–1931), ran a farm implement business in Clermont-Ferrand, France. One day, a cyclist whose pneumatic tyre needed repair turned up at the factory. The tyre was glued to the rim, and it took over three hours to remove and repair the tyre, which then needed to be left overnight to dry. The next day, Édouard Michelin took the repaired bicycle into the factory yard to test. After only a few hundred metres, the tyre failed. Despite the setback, Édouard was enthusiastic about the pneumatic tyre, and he and his brother worked on creating their own version, one that did not need to be glued to the rim. Michelin was incorporated on 28 May 1889. In 1891 Michelin took out its first patent for a removable pneumatic tyre which was used by Charles Terront to win the world's first long-distance cycle race, the 1891 Paris–Brest–Paris.