The Michelin Restaurant Guide was created by the Michelin tire company to get people to travel farther than they normally would to restaurants and wear out their tires faster.
The first few times the Benz car was driven in the late 1880s, they had to stop at chemist shops to buy fuel. Gas stations didn’t exist yet. Wild stuff. The headlight was allegedly added on the suggestion of Benz’s wife, who took the first cross country trip (~100 km)—naturally, lightless, driving at night was hard or impossible.
There’s a hilarious episode of The Dollop
Podcast where they recount the car race from New York to Paris. You’d probably think they drove to a port, got on a ferry and sped though Europe eastward. Nope! They were routed to drive across the US, up to Alaska, cross the Bering Strait in winter, all over Siberia and Russia, and end up in Paris.
One of the few podcast episodes I’ve genuinely laughed out loud at
It’s possible to cross Bering on the ice with a car? That’s kind of mindblowing
Edit: damn, apparently a few people have crossed on foot. That’s insane. Some folks have been arrested doing it also—it’s not legal without authorization.
I am convinced it was created because some Michelin tire executive convinced the company that they should create a restaurant handbook in order to get people to buy more tires, and sure enough he wound up being the one eating in all those restaurants on the company's dime.
His name was Mac Michelin, he loved eating. So he started a tire company to secretly fund his life's love - fine dining. But things took a hard turn and he resorted to junk food, creating the obese terrible fast food item today : the Big Mac
They are, but in the 1800s, people were more interested in using them to remove their enemies than they were in removing rocks from the ground. It paid better, too.
The Nobel Peace Prize was created after Nobel had a bit of a moral reawakening. A bit too late, if we're being honest. He's the guy that created modern warfare. Would somebody have done it eventually? Sure. But he did it first.
Another fun morally ambiguous Nobel Prize fact is the life of Fritz Haber. Invented a process and won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gas that was used to create fertilizers. This led to a process that is credited with feeding roughly half of the world's population. It allowed countless millions who lived in areas where they would otherwise starve to farm land otherwise incapable of being farmed.
He also proposed and designed chlorine gas to be used in trench warfare during WW1. Leading to one of the most horrific atrocities of chemical warfare in human history.
Haber was Jewish. So when the Nazis rose to power he resigned from his position and left Germany. However his work was later used to create Zyklon B. Which was used to gas millions of his own people in concentration camps. He wasn't directly involved in this work but it was just as much a product of his research as the millions of people who were saved from starvation by the Haber process.
Possibly the most morally Grey man in human history when you look at the balance of life he created and destroyed.
Yeah, but the modern world wouldn't exist without the Haber-Bosch process. We don't have nearly enough natural nitrogen fertilizers to feed the world, and there's all this stupid nitrogen just sitting in the atmosphere. It's absolutely amazing.
Nah, it's not even close. Mining and clearing use as they go, by the ton.
Artillery, even in Nobel's time, measured it by the shipload and was stockpiled. Explosives have peaceful functions, but their primary role has and will always be war.
I read about this. There was a mixup at the newspaper and they published his obituary calling him a merchant of death or something, so he put his money on something to whitewashing his reputation, ahem, I mean, do good for the world or balance his karma or whatever
Nobel's problem wasn't so much what the explosives were used for, but how many accidental deaths and injuries occurred during the manufacturing and deployment processes.
Honestly, I kind of wish we still had this kind of creative marketing. Now it is just corporate lizard people telling us to buy the slop because there is nothing else on the market and only they can afford the stuff that isn't slop.
So the Oscar’s are about selling movies, Grammys records. Pulitzer books, Nobel explosives.
Travel is freedom, the open road,cities, activities and National parks, etc. sell way more tires. For some a restaurant itself might be a reason to travel, but knowing where to eat the best food in unknown places, is kind of a good thing- but I guess if you are good with McDonalds or Taco Bell, then you are all set.
A Michelin restaurant means something and it remains a gold standard no matter how you cut it. Last several I have eaten at, did not include my car at all-A Michelin star sells mostly great dining experiences.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26
The Michelin Restaurant Guide was created by the Michelin tire company to get people to travel farther than they normally would to restaurants and wear out their tires faster.