Peter Petroff

This article is about engineer Peter Petroff. For other people, see Peter Petrow and Petar Petrow .

Peter Dimitroff Petroff (also Petar Dimitrov Petrov , or Petar Dimitrow Petrow , Bulgarian Петър Димитров Петров ; born October 21, 1919 in Brestovitza , Bulgaria , † February 27, 2003 in Huntsville , Alabama ) was a Bulgarian-American engineer, inventor and Adventurer. As the son of a Bulgarian Orthodox priest, Peter Petroff grew up in the simplest of circumstances in the southern Bulgarian town of Brestovitza. He broke off his training at a seminary in 1939 to join the French Foreign Legion . During the defense of the Maginot Line against the German Wehrmacht, he was taken prisoner of war in 1940. After his release in March 1941, he returned to Bulgaria and joined the Bulgarian army as an officer, which was then allied with the German Reich. His duties included serving as the palace guard of King Boris III. of Bulgaria. Before the advancing Red Army, he fled to Germany again in 1944, where he studied electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and construction in Darmstadt and Stuttgart and graduated with a diploma in 1947.

In 1951 he and his wife Helen went to Toronto , then to the Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay (Labrador) and Thule Air Base (Greenland), where he worked as a civil engineer for the US Air Force . From 1956, bridge and power plant projects followed in Indochina . In 1959 he sailed on a catamaran from his own production to Melbourne / Florida , where he came into contact with space technology at Radiation Inc. (now Harris Corporation ). Here he was responsible for the development of semiconductors for weather and communication satellites .

1963 he moved to Huntsville, where he Wernher von Braun instrumental in the development of rockets Saturn for the Apollo program of NASA was involved.

In 1968 Petroff founded his first company, Care Electrics , which among other things developed the first wireless heart monitor for hospitals. The company, now renamed Electro / Data , launched the world's first digital wristwatch ("Hamilton Pulsar") in 1971 at a price of $ 2,100.

In 1975 he founded ADS Environmental Services with his sons Alan, Ralph and Mark , which developed systems for computer-aided pollutant measurements. In 1989 ADS was sold to a Swedish investor. Until his death in 2003, Petroff also worked as a consultant in the next company of his sons, Time Domain , which deals with ultra-broadband technologies.

Petroff has been enthusiastic about shipbuilding since his time in Germany; his first self-built boat was built in 1947. In the course of his life he is said to have designed, built or renovated a total of 60 ships, including the Gemini II, which has been in service as a floating orphanage in Central America since 2001.

Since 2009 the headland Petroff Point on the east coast of the Brabant Island in Antarctica has been named in his honor.

Web links

• Obituary and biography in Sofia Echo (English)
• Obituary in USA Today (English)