Cyrano

Cyrano was a pioneering French automobile marque built at Bergerac in the Dordogne in 1899–1900. Its strongest contemporary account appeared in La Locomotion Automobile in February 1899. The journal said its readers already knew the cars of the designer Klaus, who after extended study had established a definitive type. Paris engineer Richard Popp acquired the licence to construct and sell that design, and Gillet-Popp et Cie manufactured it in its Bergerac workshops. The cars' local naturalization gave them the topical name Cyrano, an explicit allusion to Bergerac and to Edmond Rostand's spectacularly current play. This period attribution is more direct than later encyclopedia claims that Popp merely reproduced Lacoste & Battmann vehicles. Lacoste & Battmann may belong to the wider supplier or licensing background reported by later compilations, but the recovered 1899 article expressly identifies Klaus as designer and Popp as the licensee, so that account controls the catalog. Two mechanical identities exhaust the defensible Cyrano range. Later reference works report an initial single-cylinder voiturette and say a 3-HP engine was also available. They do not preserve its bore, stroke, displacement, cooling, transmission, price, dimensions or a separate model designation. It therefore receives one explicitly qualified 3 HP Single-Cylinder Voiturette row, with none of the better-documented twin's specifications projected onto it. The second identity is the car the period journal actually illustrated and described: a four-seat vis-à-vis using a horizontal two-cylinder four-stroke Klaus engine. Each cylinder had 100 mm bore and 180 mm stroke, giving 2,827 cc for the pair. The connecting rods worked in parallel directly on the flywheels, while alternating four-stroke phases produced one power impulse per flywheel revolution. At the normal 500 rpm the engine delivered 5 horsepower; the article records a working range from 200 to 800 rpm. This direct 1899 evidence corrects modern summaries that place the twin's introduction in 1900 or quote its five horsepower at 300 rpm. Cooling combined methods: a centrifugal pump circulated water around the cylinder heads and through a radiator, while fins on the remaining cylinder surfaces used passing air. Automatic inlet valves worked with mechanically cam-operated exhaust valves. A lever from the seat could hold the exhaust valves open or otherwise stop the engine. Battery, induction coil and spark plugs supplied electric ignition, with a distributor alternating the spark between cylinders and a seat control advancing or retarding timing. The needle carburettor had no float and could also be adjusted from the seat. Starting did not require the driver to stand at a crank: a seat-operated reciprocating lever drove a ratchet. The transmission was equally distinctive. A belt connected the engine to an intermediate shaft and ran across paired four-step cones; a transverse V-shaped chain and seat-operated crank moved the belt laterally to select four ratios. Raising or lowering the articulated intermediate-shaft carrier tensioned the belt to engage drive or slackened it to disengage. Three gears then carried motion to a differential on the rear driving axle. Reverse used a double pinion. The clutch/disengagement movement simultaneously applied one brake, and a second brake had its own lever. At the engine's normal 500 rpm, the four forward ratios produced 8, 16, 24 and 32 km/h. Cars being built when the article appeared weighed 450 kg. The writer expected simplifications associated with series production to reduce that figure to 360 kg; a later 380 kg figure should therefore be read as another state or compilation, not silently substituted for the contemporary built weight. Wheel diameter was 700 mm front and 800 mm rear. Later manual-derived references add a two-seat phaeton body alongside the four-seat vis-à-vis and quote 4,800 francs; the catalog preserves both while marking the price as later evidence because the February article itself gives neither price nor delivery terms. A regional compilation says the four-seat car achieved some success and quotes a three-month delivery period, but no order book, annual statement, chassis ledger, registration series, model split or confirmed survivor census has been recovered. No exact output is asserted. The same Popp/ Bergerac industrial thread appears in later accounts of L'Automotrice, Radia and Baudouin-Radia from 1901 to 1907. Those names may represent successor organization, relocated development or ownership evolution, but they were separately marketed marques with their own later models and are not extended backward into Cyrano rows. Conversely, the 1899 Cyrano is not treated as an alias for every Klaus, Popp or Lacoste & Battmann car. Production under the Cyrano badge ended in 1900. The complete defensible taxonomy is consequently two rows—a poorly documented 3-HP single-cylinder voiturette and the extensively documented 5-HP twin-cylinder vis-à-vis/phaeton—with corporate and technical conflicts made explicit rather than reconciled by invention.

Text adapted from “Cyrano” on Wikipedia ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗