The Renault corporation was founded in 1899 as Société Renault Frères by Louis Renault and his brothers Marcel and Fernand. Louis was a bright, aspiring young engineer who had already designed and built several prototypes before teaming up with his brothers, who had honed their business skills working for their father's textile firm. While Louis handled design and production, Marcel and Fernand managed the business. The first Renault car, the Renault Voiturette 1CV, was sold to a friend of Louis' father after giving him a test ride on 24 December 1898. André Citroën built armaments for France during World War I; after the war, however, unless he planned ahead he knew he would have a modern factory without a product. There was nothing automatic about the decision to become an automobile manufacturer once the war was finished, but the auto-business was one that Citroën knew well, thanks to a successful six-year stint working with Mors between 1908 and the outbreak of war. The decision to switch to automobile manufacturing was evidently taken as early as 1916 which is when Citroën asked the engineer Louis Dufresne, previously with Panhard, to design a technically sophisticated 18HP automobile for which he could use his factory once peace broke out. Long before that happened, however, he had modified his vision, and decided, (like Henry Ford), that the best post war opportunities in auto-making would involve a lighter car of good quality, but made in sufficient quantities to be priced enticingly. In February 1917 Citroën contacted another engineer, Jules Salomon, who already had a considerable reputation within the French automotive sector as the creator, in 1909, of a little car called Le Zèbre. André Citroën's mandate was characteristically demanding and characteristically simple: to produce an all-new design for a 10 HP car that would be better equipped, more robust and less costly to produce than any rival product at the time. The result was the Type A, announced to the press, just four months after the guns fell silent, in March 1919. The first "production" Type A emerged from the factory at the end of May, and in June it was exhibited at a show room in the Champs-Élysées which normally sold Alda cars. Citroën persuaded the owner of the Alda business, Fernand Charron, to lend him the show-room (just as a few years later Charron would be persuaded to become a major investor in Citroën business). On 7 July 1919 the first customer took delivery of a new Citroën 10HP "Type A".

• published: 07 Aug 2015
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