The Decade of Innovation (1924-1933) The Decade of Innovation (1924-1933) 
In six years, André Citroën had done exceedingly well in
the difficult business of car building, even taking over the Mors company
along the way in 1925. But the next model, the B 14, was the one which really
hit the jackpot. This was the last design the brilliant Salomon did for
the company before leaving to join Lucien Rosengart, another Citroën
director who left in 1927 to spend a year with Peugeot before setting up
shop on his own account to produce the Austin Seven under license in France.
But Salomon's parting gift was a winner all the way. Still using the old
A engine - its cylinders were now hardened for longer life - stretched to
70 mm bore with horsepower upped to 22 bhp at 2300 rpm, the car was fitted
with a neat, close-coupled four-door body. Eventually it was to appear in
a whole series of variations: the basic B 14 sedan, the B 15 light van,
the B 14 F with Hungarian-made Westinghouse servo-brakes, and the B 14 G
which made its first appearance in 1928. By now Citroën's factory was
turning out the cars at an astonishing 400 per day, and thanks to clever
design flexibility was still able to offer buyers a daunting choice of twenty-eight
different bodies. By now, too, Citroën was employing 35,000 workers,
with plants in eleven foreign countries. But it was in the shops at Quai
de Javel that the company held a party to celebrate Charles Lindbergh's
Atlantic flight in May 1927.
Up to this point, André Citroën had two automotive achievements
to his credit: he had built up a highly successful car-building enterprise,
and used it to sell good, cleverly designed but basically conventional cars
in very large numbers. From now on, he was beginning, tentatively, to add
what was to become the third ingredient in the Citroën formula - highly
advanced engineering ideas and greater originality in design, which would
allow the company to exploit mass production still further by carrying out
long production runs with each new model.
The first signs of the new approach appeared with the C 4 and C 6 Citroëns
which emerged at the 1928 Paris show. These used similar four- and six-cylinder
versions of an engine derived from the original Type A unit, the four with
72 by 100 mm bore/stroke for 1628 cc, with 30 bhp developed at 3000 rpm;
the six sharing the same bore/stroke dimensions for 2442 cc and 42 bhp at
3000 rpm. The cylinders were cast in a single unit with cylinder head. Each
model came in short- and long-wheelbase versions, with tough monobloc bodies,
and during the three-year production run detail improvements included wider
track, better instrument layout and greater comfort. In 1931 both models
were updated still more: the C 4 became the C 4 G. with a bored-out 75 mm
engine and greatly improved front suspension carrying a simpler and stronger
integral-construction body. The C 6 collected the same improvements, but
the big news for this model was the result of Citroën's trip to the
United States earlier in the year. There he had met a fellow Frenchman,
an engineer named Lemaire who had developed a vibration-damping engine mounting
for Chrysler, which called it Floating Power. Citroën spent huge sums
of money buying the patents from Chrysler - and Lemaire as well. Floating
Power was introduced on the C 6, and later on the C 4 (which needed it more),
and Lemaire came to the company to begin work on more sophisticated suspensions
still.
The C series was successful commercially - a grand total of 360,000 cars
were made by the time the run ended in October 1932. But potential for future
development was poor, so that the company started again on a clean sheet
of drawing paper for the next model. At the Paris show of 1932, the successors
appeared for the first time - and they would be called the Rosalies, after
their sturdy little namesakes which stormed around Montlhéry in search
of international long-distance records, the most famous of which was Petite
Rosalie, which spent 134 days on the track, totting up close to 200,000
miles at an average speed of 57.8 mph in the process. Once again, these
Citroëns were a series rather than a single model: the smallest, the
8 A, used an engine of the same measurements, 68 by 100 mm, as the old B
2, but now producing 32 bhp at 3200 rpm. Then came the 10 A, using the engine
of the C 4, and the 15 A, using that of the C 6. Bodies were stronger and
even simpler than ever before, using a total of only four major pressings,
and they came in four sizes: the smallest for the 8 A and 10 A, an interim
size as an option for the 10 A and the two largest for the 15 A. Detail
improvements were added in the usual way: after a year the 8 A had torsion-bar
front suspension, adapted two years later for the 10 A. and both the 15
A and the larger version of the 10 A carried a freewheel system using patents
bought by Citroën from Studebaker, which had brought them from Chenard
et Walcker which had developed it ten years before. Ironically, Citroën
himself had been given first refusal in 1922, but he now had to pay for
his lack of foresight on this point by settling a much steeper bill with
the American company.
There was still something missing from the Citroën prescription.
His cars were well made and well liked, exceedingly popular with their owners,
yet never likely to set the Seine on fire. Although he understood the advantages
and drawbacks of volume production better than most of his contemporaries,
he had never really seen that the one way to ensure the kind of long production
runs so necessary for real success was to use designs which were individual
enough and advanced enough to avoid having to be changed simply because
they seemed dated. What he needed was a car so unusual and so attractive
in its own right, that it didn't matter to buyers that it had been in production
five years, or ten, or twenty.
