Today a chauffeur is someone employed to drive someone else, usually to posh places in a posh car. But why are they called a ‘chauffeur’? Turns out the word has surprisingly hot origins. Literally.
As you might have already guessed, ‘chauffeur’ is a French word. It means ‘stoker’, as in someone who looks after a fire. That comes from the verb ‘chauffer’, meaning ‘to heat’, which goes all the way back through Old French to the Latin calefacere, a compound of calere (‘to be warm’, which is also where we get the word ‘calorie’ from, as well as ‘chafe’) and facere (‘to do’).
So what does driving celebs and rich people around have to do with poking a fire? The term emerged in the 1890s, when French manufacturers dominated the early motor industry. They used Daimler engines fitted with something called hot tube igniters. These had to be heated with a Bunsen burner before the engine could fire, and the platinum tubes needed careful ongoing maintenance. This delicate, skilled work fell to a dedicated person called, you’ve guessed it, a chauffeur. By 1900, the hot tube was obsolete but the role didn’t disappear – it evolved, with the chauffeur becoming driver, mechanic and roadside repair expert as pneumatic tyres brought a whole new set of problems. The chauffeurs themselves were causing issues too – a 1906 article in The New York Times reported that ‘the chauffeur problem today is one of the most serious that the automobilist has to deal with’, complaining that ‘young men of no particular ability, who have been earning from $10 to $12 a week, are suddenly elevated to salaried positions paying from $25 to $50’. Plus ça change.
In modern French, ‘chauffeur’ is used more broadly to mean any professional driver, including bus and taxi drivers, without the luxury connotations we attach to it in English. There’s also a female version, ’chauffeuse’, although that’s pretty rare (as are female chauffeurs, presumably).
One particularly notable chauffeur was Roosevelt Smith Zanders (1912–1995). He was known for driving many famous clients around, including Richard Nixon, Margot Fontaine, Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy and Lana Turner. He also drove 100 pounds of shrimp to John Wayne while he was in Paris, delivered $200,000 in cash for Aristotle Onassis and sent two tiger cubs to the President of Panama. Not bad for someone who started out with a single Cadillac.
