What came first — the Whale of the Electric Egg?

0 0 August 09, 2024 Edit this post

by Bill Buys

A TWO-seat, three-wheeled bubble car, sought-after works of art, huge railway locomotives and carriages, a massive streamlined sports car and the conversion of a WWII bomber for General Eisenhower . . . the unrelated subjects could hardly be the work of one man.

But Paul Arzens, born in Paris in 1903, was one of the gifted few.

He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and, unlike most new artists, was soon able to live well from sales of his paintings.

That gave him time to pursue his interests in the engineering and design, resulting, in 1942, of an extraordinary little car which quickly became known on the streets of Paris as L'Œuf électrique, or the Electric Egg.

It was a bespoke lightweight personal car that he used for scooting about the French capital, some 30 years before Elon Musk, of Tesla fame, was even born.

Arzens hatched the Egg as a means of overcoming petrol rationing during World War II and decided it was a better option than the wood-gas generators that many motorists were turning to.

Some 12 per cent of the 71,690 passenger cars registered in France in January, 1944, were powered by wood-gas generators.

He created the egg shape of his car from hand-formed aluminium and Plexiglas sheets on a frame he built of Duralinox tube, making it corrosion-proof.

Power came from an electric motor that drove the rear wheel, and five batteries which took the total weight to 350kg.

In that form the Egg had a range of 100km and a top speed of 60km/h.

There was nothing else like it and it turned every head, including that of Ettore Bugatti.

Three years later, when the war ended, he replaced the electric motor with a single cylinder 125cc engine from a Peugeot motorcycle, which made it lighter, more efficient and lifted top speed to 80km/h.

He had no intention of producing more Eggs and his one and only remained his property until his death in 1990, when it joined the collections of the Musée des arts et métiers.

Earlier, it was put on display at the at the High Museum of Arts in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of the Dream Cars exhibition: Innovative Design, Visionary.

In 1968, Arzens mentioned in an interview that economy was not the only aim he had in producing the Electric Egg.

“One major advantage is its small size,” he said.

“It’s easy to park. Space in Paris is unfortunately very limited. There are roughly 240,000 parking spots on Parisian streets, so if we launch a car that’s about half the size of a standard car we can park around twice as many vehicles here.”

However, it was not his first car.

In contrast to the diminutive Egg, in 1938 he built his La Baleine (the Whale).

It was a striking, low-slung aluminium streamliner, all of seven metres in length and based on a Buick chassis.

It had a perspex windscreen and removable roof and made several appearances in the popular global Tintin publications of Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

The Whale, which also became an eye-opening sight in Parisian traffic, is now housed in the Cité de l’Automobile in Mulhouse.

And then there’s the French national train service, the SCNF, which from the early 1950s used Arzens on its designs of its locomotives and its first high-speed train projects in the late 1960s.

In addition he also designed the panoramic railcars, which were put into service from 1959 and were equipped with a central 'vistadome' offering passengers a panoramic view of the landscape.

Another major work by Arzens came in 1944.

He converted a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber that General Eisenhower, Chief of Staff of the Allied Forces in Europe, had donated to General Koenig, then military governor of Paris.

With the help of workers from the Caudron aircraft manufacturer, he began by removing three tonnes of the big plane’s armament and armour.

Next, he replaced the nose of the aircraft and the rear turret with more aerodynamic Plexiglas profiles.

In the fuselage, he fitted a bedroom with two sofas, a living-dining room with four folding tables and 12 seats and a telephone connecting the living room to the cockpit.

General Koenig made a few trips to Morocco and Algeria in it, then gave the plane to the French ambassador to Germany.

At some stage the plane crashed during a landing and was taken into account by the National Geographic Institute (IGN), taken back to France and repaired.

But it was scrapped a few months later, because the IGN already had around about 15 B-17s, more than it needed for its work.

Pity.

Paul Arzens himself used his Electric Egg (the name stuck, despite its later internal combustion engine) and his Whale until the end of his life at 87 -- and he was the only one who could drive them.