The Citroën double chevron may trace back to a Polish carpenter's gears
Around 1900, a young French engineer visiting his late mother's homeland of Poland watched a carpenter shaping gears with teeth arranged like a fishbone. They ran quieter and more efficiently than ordinary gears. André Citroën bought the patent cheaply, improved it, and that herringbone pattern is said to have inspired his carmaker's twin-chevron badge.
The family name itself has a fruity history. A Dutch grandfather who sold tropical fruit had taken the surname Limoenman, meaning lime man; his son switched it to Citroen, Dutch for lemon. After the family moved to Paris in 1873, the two dots over the e were added, reputedly by one of André's teachers. André, born in Paris in 1878, was the youngest of five children of a diamond merchant. Inspired, it is said, by Jules Verne and by watching the Eiffel Tower go up, he chose engineering and graduated from the École Polytechnique in 1899.
In 1908 he became a manager at the car firm Mors. The First World War made his name internationally: he became famous for turning out armaments in huge volumes, with extensive work tied to a Renault plant where 35,000 men made munitions. In 1919 he founded his own car company and chose a site in Paris's 15th arrondissement, then largely market gardens, for Europe's first mass-production car factory.
Citroën grew fast. By its 1932 peak it was the fourth-largest carmaker in the world, led by the pioneering Traction Avant. But costs, worsened by the Great Depression, pushed the company into bankruptcy in 1934, and its main creditor and tyre supplier, Michelin, took control. The Traction Avant recovered and stayed in production until 1957. Citroën himself died of stomach cancer in Paris in 1935.
Paris has since honoured him twice. In 1958 the riverside Quai de Javel, named after a chemical works famous for bleach, became the Quai André Citroën. Then in 1992 a public park opened on the site of the demolished factory and took his name.
Source: André Citroën
