A garage, a stamping press and Chanel money

Félix Amiot grew up watching the pioneers fly at Issy-les-Moulineaux and built his first aeroplane in a nearby garage at 18. Called back from the front in 1915, he devised a way of assembling metal parts by stamping. The idea caught the eye of armaments minister Louis Loucheur, and Pierre Wertheimer, owner of Chanel and Bourjois perfumes, put up the money for SECM in 1916. It first repaired and licence-built Morane-Saulnier, Breguet and Sopwith aircraft, moved to a new factory at Colombes in 1919, and in 1928 bought the Latham seaplane works.

The ugly 143 and the elegant 354

Amiot’s own designs arrived with the Amiot 120 family; an Amiot 123 twice tried to fly the Atlantic with a Polish crew in 1928 and 1929. Then came the Amiot 143 bomber, first flown on 1 August 1934, a slab-sided monoplane widely counted among the ugliest aircraft ever to fly; 138 were built. Its successor could not have been more different. The sleek Amiot 340, 350 and 370 series set a string of speed records in 1937–1939 and the air force ordered 1,800, but production delays meant few reached squadrons before the fall of France.

Junkers, perfume and the boats of Cherbourg

In June 1940 Amiot moved 3,000 workers south and the Wertheimers fled to America, leaving him their shares in SECM and in Chanel. He fended off Coco Chanel’s attempt to seize the perfume business and built 370 Junkers Ju 52s for the Germans, while quietly funding a resistance network. Cleared after the war, he saw SECM nationalised in 1946; Ju 52 production continued there as the AAC.1 Toucan. Amiot rebuilt his Cherbourg works as CMN, a shipyard whose missile boats slipped out to Israel on Christmas Eve 1969 in defiance of a French embargo.

工厂

• Colombes works · Colombes, Hauts-de-Seine — Main factory from 1919; burned by the French army in June 1940
• Latham works · Caudebec-en-Caux — Bought 1928; nationalised into SNCAN in 1937
• Cherbourg works · Cherbourg — Opened 1938; became the CMN shipyard
• Marseille factory · Marseille — Wartime plant in the unoccupied zone

人们

• Félix Amiot · founder (1894–1974) — Inventor of a stamping process for aircraft metal parts
• Pierre Wertheimer · financier — Owner of Chanel and Bourjois
• Maurice Rossi · pilot — Flew the Amiot 370 records

纪录和第一

• Amiot 370: speed records over 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 km with loads up to 2,000 kg, 1937–1939