Georges Paulin

Georges Paulin was a dentist, part-time automobile designer and hero of the French Resistance during the Second World War. He was born 1902 in a working class section of Paris.

He designed, and in 1931 patented, the first power-operated retractable hardtop which in 1934 was used in the Peugeot 402BL Éclipse Décapotable, a small coupe. An American named Ben P. Ellerbeck had innovated the first practical retractable hardtop system 1922 &mdash; a manually operated system on a Hudson coupe that never saw full production.

Between 1934 and 1938 he was the designer for French chassis maker Pourtout. Among his designs were a Panhard coupe, a Unic cabriolet, a Delage D8, the “water drop” Talbot-Lago, the Darl'mat Peugeot roadsters used in 1937 and 1938 at Le Mans.

From 1938 to 1940 he worked exclusively for Rolls-Royce-Bentley. For them he designed the Corniche 1 in 1939 and the Comet Competition.

In July 1940 he began working with British Intelligence to fight the Nazis.

Turned in to the Gestapo by French Vichy elements he was arrested in 1941 and condemned to death by a German military tribunal. He was executed March 1942.

He was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government.