Petar Petrov (Peter Petroff), an engineer from the village of Brestovitsa in the Plovdiv region, worked for NASA and helped create one of the world's first digital wristwatches. He was born 107 years ago today. Read more about Petar Petrov. In America he is known as Peter Petroff.
Petrov was born on 21 October 1919, in the autumn after Bulgaria lost the First World War. He served in the Bulgarian army in the 1940s and was in Germany when the Second World War ended. The communists were by then in power at home, and he did not go back.
In the 1950s he moved to North America and settled in the US.
In the 1960s Petrov worked for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. He helped build the telemetry for weather and communications satellites. This is the electronics that collects data from the instruments on board and sends it to Earth.
Between 1970 and 1972, Petrov developed the electronics for the Pulsar watch. It had no hands and no spring. Its red digits lit up only when the wearer pressed a button, because LEDs use a lot of power and the small battery could not otherwise last.
Petrov also had his own firm, Care Electronics, which he sold in the autumn of 1971 to Electro-Data, Inc. of Garland, Texas. He worked, too, on one of the world's first wireless cardiac monitors. It let a doctor watch a patient's heart from a distance, without wires tying the patient to the bed.
Petar Petrov died in Huntsville on 27 February 2003, aged 83. A headland on Brabant Island in Antarctica, Petroff Point, carries his name.