Le Chauffeur, a short history lesson.

A Chauffeur is not simply your classic driver, a "driver" may deliver pizza etc. Being a Chauffeur is a whole culture unto itself. The term does not even mean “driver.” Originally the term Chauffeur comes from the French language, where “chauffer” means to stoke, and “chauffeur” is therefore a stoker.

The reason for this is that historically, the first automobiles, just as their early counterparts in railroad rolling stock and watercraft, were driven by steam and needed the driver – “le chauffeur” – to stoke the vehicle’s engine, “le moteur.” You see, the first generation of motorcars were powered by gasoline (“petrol”) and relied on preheated “hot tubes” located in the cylinder head to start up the engine: this was in the days before electrical ignition.

So the original "Chauffeur" was essentially the heater of those tubes, priming the system at the beginning of the trip and counting on the engine’s compression cycle to keep the tubes continuously heated to the right temperature.

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