Visitors to the 1905 Paris motor show "who wish above all to appreciate the progress of the car in the touring category will obviously go to the stand of the Société des Automobiles Peugeot", reported French sports newspaper L'Auto.
Meanwhile, at the stand of Le Fils de Peugeot Frères, "exhibited amid victorious and nickel-gleaming bicycles and motorcycles is the voiturette that appears to be the true expression of everyone's desires and needs" – so much so that it caught the attention of the French president, who declared: "So, here is the true popular car!"
Hang on… two distinct Peugeot companies, making unrelated cars and promoting them on separate stands at the same show? How very confusing! Just what was going on? To answer that question, we first need to go all the way back to 1810 – a whole lifetime before the car was invented – when a family named Peugeot established a steel foundry in eastern France.
Some six decades later, an ambitious son, Armand, undertook an engineering placement in Leeds, England, where he witnessed the birth of bicycles and tricycles – or vélocipèdes as he called them. He returned home in 1871 and by 1885 had convinced his family to enter this exciting new industry.
The next invention to capture his imagination was the steam boiler, but his attempt to use this to power a cycle proved unsuccessful. At the 1889 Universal Exposition, though, he discovered a far greater solution: the internal combustion engine.
Consequently Peugeot became the first French firm to build a true car, the Type 2 emerging in 1890 with a Daimler-supplied engine. Two years later, Armand went to the board with a bold plan: to invest F500,000 (£2.2m in modern money) in building a factory specifically for cars, but this was deemed too risky.
He tried again in 1895, with Peugeot's car sales rising steadily, and had it approved – but just a month later, his cousin Eugène engineered a dramatic reversal. "It is decided that the production of motor cars shall be abandoned," stated the board meeting report.
