• Jalopnik, Tuesday, May 3, 2011 10:45 AM

The somewhat official story was that Chevy Founder Billy Durant came up with the Chevrolet logo while pondering wallpaper in a Paris hotel. Not so, according to Durant's widow Catherine, who, in an interview with Lawrence Gustin, author of the 1973 biography Billy Durant said her husband saw the emblem in a Virginia newspaper while the couple vacationed in Hot Springs. But where was the evidence? Chevrolet historian Ken Kaufmann found it in old issues of an Atlanta newspaper, The Constitution. He found an ad for "Coalettes," "The little coals with the big heat!" He writes that the coal company, realizing Americans wouldn't know to put the emphasis on the second syllable, à la French, made the "E" in "ettes" large, and framed the entire brand name in a black parallelogram, save for a bump in the middle for the "E."

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