In 1930, de Beauclair began studying general mechanical engineering at the Darmstadt University of Technology.
There, he was involved in the construction of an automatic calculator with punched tape programming, which was destroyed during the bombing of Darmstadt like the entire IPM.
From 1939, he developed together with Hans-Joachim Dreyer, both from IPM to the company OTT in Kempten, a new type of electromechanical cutting wheel integration system to solve differential equations, the DGM-IPM-Ott, of which there are still assemblies in the inventory of the German Museum Munich.
As head of the precision engineering workshop at the IPM, de Beauclair subsequently supported Zuse with the work on the Z4.
Initially de Beauclair worked for the Göttingen company PHYWE in sales, then from 1955 as a development engineer and laboratory manager at SEL, where Dr.-Ing.
In 1968 his book, Calculating with Machines, a visual history of computing technology from its origins to 1964, was published by the FAZ, then reviewed and reprinted in 2005 by Springer-Verlag.
[3] In May 2002, he was awarded the Prochorov Order of the International Informatization Academy (Moscow) at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Wilfried de Beauclair was married to Gertrud Schäfer from 1942 until her death in 1968 and is the father of a daughter and a son.