Bridgestone is its founder's surname, Stone Bridge, flipped into English
Shōjirō Ishibashi's family name means stone bridge in Japanese. When he launched a tyre company in 1931, he translated it and swapped the order to get Bridgestone. The business grew out of a firm making split-toe work socks with rubber soles, and it is now the world's second-largest tyre maker by revenue.
The first Bridgestone tyre came out on 9 April 1930 from the tyre division of a company producing jika-tabi, rubber-soled worker's footwear. The Bridgestone Tire Company followed on 1 March 1931 in Kurume, in Fukuoka Prefecture. Ishibashi chose to rely mainly on Japanese technology rather than imported European and American know-how, and the young firm struggled with production and sales before quality improvements let it grow at home and abroad.
War nearly ruined it. Wartime controls sent almost all output to the military, bombing destroyed the Tokyo headquarters, and every overseas asset was lost. The Kurume and Yokohama plants survived, however, and production restarted as soon as the fighting ended. Branching out, the company formed a bicycle business in 1949, built powered bicycles with 26cc engines from 1952 and 50cc motorcycles from 1958, although supplying tyres to Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha earned far more, and it eventually dropped motorcycles. Ishibashi also founded the Bridgestone Museum of Art in 1952.
The postwar climb was fast. In 1951 it became the first Japanese company to sell rayon cord tyres, and by 1953 sales passed ten billion yen, putting it at the top of the domestic industry. Nylon tyres followed in 1959 and a new Tokyo plant in 1960 as car ownership boomed. After listing on the stock exchange in 1961, it adopted quality-control methods named after W. Edwards Deming and won the Deming Prize in 1968. Its first radial tyre, the RD10, went on sale in 1967.
In 1988 Bridgestone bought the American Firestone company, and it has supplied tyres for Formula One, Le Mans and motorcycle Grand Prix racing. It has also faced legal trouble, including a 425 million dollar US fine in 2014 for price fixing and bid rigging.
Source: Bridgestone
