The origin of the 'Teddy Bear'
As folklore has it, teddy was born in 1902, when President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was taking a well-deserved break on a shooting trip in Mississippi. When the local game failed to show up, aides captured and stunned a bear cub and offered it to Roosevelt to finish off. Deeming this "unsporting," the president declined. His act of mercy was caricatured in the next day's Washington Post. The cartoon caught the eye of New York sweet shop owner Morris Michtom, who asked his wife to make a toy "Teddy's bear" to go in the shop window by the drawing. Back came an anthropomorphised bear, a marketing coup so successful that within a year the Michtoms had shut up shop to start the Ideal Novelty and Toy company, now one of the largest in the world.