3 ms·
My coffee table book "The Physics Book", by Clifford A. Pickover, dates practical applications of the clothoid curve back to at least 1901, when an engineer by
by TheRealPomax 11y ago
My coffee table book "The Physics Book", by Clifford A. Pickover, dates practical applications of the clothoid curve back to at least 1901, when an engineer by the name of Edwin C. Prescott received a patent for their use in rollercoaster designs (after discovering the acceleration problems associated with circular loops some 1~2 years prior).
- delhanty 11y agoMy point was that the use of Euler Spirals (aka clothoids) were ubiquitous in commercial CAD systems for highway design well before Raph Levien's work in fonts. My datapoint of 1995 in Japan certainly would not have been the first, but it does show how widespread their use has been.