Hispano-Suiza's aluminium aircraft engine shaped the luxury cars that followed
During the First World War, Swiss engineer Marc Birkigt cast an entire aircraft engine block from a single piece of aluminium and slid thin steel liners inside. The result was lighter and stronger than engines bolted together from separate cylinders, and it made the Spanish-Swiss firm Hispano-Suiza a name that even Rolls-Royce borrowed from.
The company's story starts in 1898, when Spanish artillery captain Emilio de la Cuadra began building electric cars in Barcelona. In Paris he met Birkigt and hired him, and by 1900 their firm had produced the first internal combustion engines designed and built in Spain. After changes of ownership, the business was refounded in 1904 as Hispano-Suiza, meaning Spanish-Swiss, with Birkigt and Damián Mateu among its founders.
France soon proved a bigger market for its luxury cars than Spain. An assembly plant opened near Paris in 1911, and a larger factory at Bois-Colombes became the home of the grandest, costliest models. When war came, Birkigt turned to aero engines; his cast-block V8 also used overhead camshafts. After the war the H6 car of 1919 carried an overhead-cam six derived from that engine, and makers worldwide sought licences for Hispano-Suiza patents, Rolls-Royce among them, fitting its power brakes for years. The stork mascot on the radiator came from the squadron emblem on a Hispano-powered fighter flown by French ace Georges Guynemer.
In 1923 the French arm became a semi-independent company, with Barcelona keeping 71 percent of the shares, while Spanish factories moved increasingly into buses, trucks and aircraft engines. By the 1930s the firm also made weapons. In 1937 the French state took over the French operation for war production, and during the Spanish Civil War both sides seized its factories in Barcelona and Seville. The truck maker ENASA absorbed the Spanish assets in 1946, and the French aviation business eventually passed to Snecma in 1968, now part of Safran.
The name has since returned to cars. Descendants of the founding Suqué Mateu family relaunched Hispano Suiza in Spain, and in 2019 it unveiled the Carmen, a fully electric hypercar producing 1,119 horsepower.
Source: Hispano-Suiza
