page_title: De Dion-Bouton
section_title: Expansion
hierarchical_section_title: De Dion-Bouton / Expansion
caption_attribution_description: English: William Govett driving a De Dion Bouton "Populaire" on an unsealed road. William Govett wearing a jacket and cap with a blanket over his knees. He is driving a French De Dion Bouton ca. 1905 motor vehicle on an unsealed road. A post and rail fence is visible on the side of the road.
context_page_description: De Dion-Bouton was a French automobile manufacturer and railcar manufacturer operating from 1883 to 1953. The company was founded by the Marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, Georges Bouton, and Bouton's brother-in-law Charles Trépardoux.
  The company was formed after de Dion in 1881 saw a toy locomotive in a store window and asked the toymakers to build another. Engineers Bouton and Trépardoux had been eking out a living with scientific toys at a shop in the Passage de Léon, near "rue de la Chapelle" in Paris. Trépardoux had long dreamed of building a steam car, but neither could afford it.
  De Dion, already inspired by steam and with ample money, agreed, and De Dion, Bouton et Trépardoux was formed in Paris in 1883. This became the De Dion-Bouton automobile company, the world's largest automobile manufacturer for a time, becoming well known for their quality, reliability and durability.
context_section_description: In 1900, De Dion-Bouton was the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, producing 400 cars and 3,200 engines. The company soon began producing engines and licenses for other automobile companies with an estimate of 150 makes using them. Production was so great, it proved impossible to test every engine; if it failed on the bench, it was simply disassembled. Every engine was being made by hand; the assembly line had not yet been introduced. By 1904 some 40,000 engines had been supplied across Europe. That year, De Dion-Bouton's factory at Quai National (now Quai de Dion-Bouton), Puteaux, employed 1,300 and produced more than 2,000 cars, all hand-made.
  The engine moved to the front in 1903 in the Populaire with 700 or 942 cc (42.7 or 57.5 cu in) engines, the latter being powerful enough to allow trucks to be added to cars, and by the end of the year reverse gear had also appeared. It was joined by the 6 CV (4 kW) 864 cc (52.5 in³) Types N and Q (the latter a low-priced K), the 8 CV (6 kW) R, and their first multi-cylinder model, the two-cylinder 1728 cc (105 in³) 12 CV (8 kW) S, followed in 1904 by the four-cylinder 2,545 cc (155.3 cu in) 15 CV (11 kW) Type AD and 24 CV (18 kW) AI. The cars were also getting more and more conventional in styling, with the radiator moving in front of the engine and the clutch changing from hand lever to pedal.
  A pair of works 10 CV (7.5 kW) De Dion-Boutons, in the hands of Cormier and Collignon, ran in the 1907 Peking to Paris rally, without success. Bouvier St. Chaffray did no better in the New York to Paris in 1908. That year, De Dion-Bouton peaked as a manufacturer.
  The company became the first to make a successful mass-produced V8 engine, a 35 CV (26 kW) 6,107 cc (372.7 cu in) CJ in 1910, followed by a 7.8 liter and a 14.7 liter for the U.S., as well as by a 3,534 cc (215.7 cu in) Type CN in 1912. (They trailed Ader in racing the 1906 Adams, which used an Antoinette aircraft engine.) This would be the company's last innovation.
  During World War I the company made gun parts, armoured vehicles, and aircraft engines, as well as cars and trucks. The company produced an anti-aircraft version of the French 75mm field gun, the Canon de 75 modèle 1897, mounted on a V8-powered De Dion-Bouton truck for the French Army between 1913 and 1918.
  In Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916, which opened the Irish War of Independence, The O'Rahilly drove his De Dion Bouton up to the Irish HQ in O'Connell Street, and, discovering that the Rising he had planned and trained soldiers for and then tried to prevent, was actually going on, he drove it into a barricade, walked into the GPO and said: "I've helped to wind the clock, I've come to hear it strike." He was killed in a charge against a machine gun nest in Moore Street days later. A famous photograph shows the skeleton of the car in its barricade.
caption: A De Dion-Bouton in 1905
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