
During his time at the camp he continued to develop his ideas and even formed study groups with other engineers.

Image credit: Alberto-g-rovi, via Wikimedia CommonsDuring World War II Pierre Bézier spent 2 years in a prisoner camp for officers. During this time cars became squarer and more “computery”. by the 1970s even if all parts of the car were not designed in CAD, computer-aided design was certainly having an influence on automotive design, as can be seen in this Renault Alpine A310. His doctorate study was in parametric polynomial curves, his dissertation entitled: “Essai de définition numérique des courbes et surfaces expérimentales” (Numerical definition test of experimental curves and surfaces).

Pierre Bézier (1910-1999) started working on mathematical modeling from the start of his career. It’s incredible to think how groundbreaking the technology was at the time, given that we use CAD every day on our laptops. The computer is using tape, is larger than my fridge and there is no mouse. In it you can see the computer drawing ink on paper and machine tooling a part. By 1999, 1,500 employees at Renault were using UNISURF CAD software.Ī news report of the time showcases the new drawing and tooling capabilities of UNISURF (French). It was one of the first cars to be designed using CAD software. In 1968 they designed the whole body of the Peugeot model 204 in UNISURF. The Peugeot 204 was the first car who’s bodywork was completely build using UNISURF CAD. A few of the engineers at Peugeot expressed an interest in UNISURF and aided with the development of the system. However, as luck would have it, in 1966 Renault and Peugeot signed an agreement to cooperate in research and development. He resolved to research methods to apply numerical control for car body tooling and die-cast models anyway. They declined and practically demoted him! At the end of the 1950s Bézier suggested that Renault should invest money in researching numerical controls. Unbelievably, the car industry was initially reluctant to adopt CAD for automotive design.

The bézier curve was developed to allow engineers to create the complex curvature of a car’s bodywork with a computer. However, it was Paul de Castelijau who invented the bézier curve. In 1968 the Peugeot model 204 bodywork was designed entirely using UNISURF.
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In the 1960s he developed UNISURF CAD, one of the first CAD software packages.
