Paul Kollsman

Paul Kollsman (February 22, 1900, in Germany – September 26, 1982, in Beverly Hills, California) was a German-American inventor. He invented the first sensitive barometer, a key enabler of instrument flight in airplanes.

The United States Patent Office cites him as the inventor on 124 patents.

Biography Kollsman studied engineering and science in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1923 he emigrated from Germany to the United States, following his younger brother Ernest Otto Kollsman, who had emigrated earlier.

He worked as a truck driver or truck driver's assistant until he found a position at Pioneer Instrument Company in Brooklyn, New York, where he learned to make various aircraft instruments.

He left Pioneer in 1928 and with $500 saved while working, Paul and his brother Otto founded Kollsman Instruments Co. in Brooklyn New York.

In 1929 U.S. Army Lt. James H. Doolittle was leading the development of equipment and methods for instrument flying, under the sponsorship of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. He learned of a new altimeter design submitted to the Bureau of Standards by Paul Kollsman, and arranged a meeting.

On August 30, 1929, Doolittle and Kollsman took the altimeter on a test flight in a Vought O2U, a two seat biplane, with Kollsman holding the altimeter in his lap. Doolittle said the altimeter "performed perfectly", with accuracy an order of magnitude better than other altimeters of the day.

A short time later the Kollsman company received an order from the U.S. Navy for 300 altimeters, their first commercial success. By the mid-1930s Kollsman altimeters dominated the aircraft market.

In 1940 the Kollsman Instrument Company was sold to Square D Company of Detroit for over $4,000,000. Paul became a Square D vice president in charge of the Kollsman Instrument division.

In 1951 Square D sold the Kollsman division to Standard Coil Products Co. of Chicago, a maker of TV tuners, for over $5,000,000. Standard Coil named long-time Kollsman general manager Victor Carbonara as vice-president of the division, implying that Paul Kollsman left the company after this sale.

In 1940 Kollsman purchased of land outside Manchester, Vermont from International Paper Company, and founded Snow Valley, which formally opened in January 1942, and was one of the earliest ski areas in the United States. Snow Valley operated continuously until 1984, and in 1983 hosted the first U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships — now held annually at Stratton, Vermont. Snow Valley is being redeveloped as a private sporting community.

In 1944 Kollsman married Baroness Julie "Luli" Dorothea Baronin von Bodenhausen, an actress and author, in New York City; she died in 1951. In 1952 he married his second wife, Eva F. Kollsman, who survived him. Paul Kollsman died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California in 1982. After Allen's death in 2018 it sold in 2021 for $65 million, under half of the original asking price.