For many years, there has been a saying among car owners: “There are cars and there is Mercedes.” But Mercedes gave up ground and now they use a different phrase: “There are cars and there is Toyota.” Today is the birthday of the internationally renowned car maker. Toyota was established on 28 August 1937.

But the story started long before that. And it started not with a car but with a loom. At the very end of the 19th century, Sakichi Toyoda invented Japan’s first steam-powered loom. In 1918, he founded a same name company. In a few years, Sakichi and his son, Kiichiro, built an automatic loom. The old man fulfilled the dream of his life.

But his son dreamed of cars, as by the end of the 1920s cars quite settled in on the U.S. and European streets. Kiichiro traveled the New and the Old World and studied Western best practices. Upon his return, he started designing gasoline-fueled cars. The business was so successful that Kiichiro Toyoda headed the new company, which was named...

Yes, he wanted to name it Toyoda, too, but superstitions got in the way. The word “Toyoda” takes nine brush strokes to write in Japanese and nine is a unlucky number in the Land of the Rising Sun. So they held a contest to choose a new name. Toyota won because it took eight brush strokes to write. And the number eight is not just a lucky number, it is also a symbol of wealth and prosperity.

Maybe it was a sign or traditional Japanese industry and precision but Toyota is the world’s acknowledged car making leader. By the turn of the century, the number of those who ever “drove the dream” had surpassed the hundred million mark. Today, Toyota is the world’s largest car maker and millions of the people dream of a stylized “T” letter on the hood. Although there is a version that the popular logo is a stylized loop in memory of Toyota’s loom past.