Karl Probst (20 October 1883 – 25 August 1963) was an American
freelance
''Freelance'' (sometimes spelled ''free-lance'' or ''free lance''), ''freelancer'', or ''freelance worker'', are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance w ...
engineer and automotive pioneer, credited with drafting the design drawings of the first prototype of the Bantam Reconnaissance Car, also known as the World War II "jeep" in 1940. He was born in Point Pleasant, West Virginia to Charles and Eva (Knight) Probst. He studied engineering at Ohio State University and graduated in 1906.
Probst was recruited by
American Bantam
The American Bantam Car Company was an American automobile manufacturing company incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania. American Bantam is credited with the invention of the Original Jeep in 1940. The company's founders, Roy Evans and Willia ...
Car Company in 1940 to help it win a contract to provide the U.S. Army with a lightweight reconnaissance vehicle that could transport troops and equipment across rugged terrain. Bantam had provided the specifications to the Army, and Probst drafted the design for the Jeep in two days, commencing on 17 June 1940, Bantam's first hand-built prototype was complete and running by September 21, 1940, just meeting the 49-day deadline and was delivered to the Army Quartermaster Corps for testing at Camp Holabird, MD.
He died in Dayton, Ohio.
Legacy
The
Port Authority of Allegheny County
Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT, formerly Port Authority of Allegheny County) is the second-largest public transit agency in Pennsylvania and the 20th-largest in the United States. The state-funded agency is based in Pittsburgh and is overseen ...
pays homage to Karl Probst by putting his name on one or more of the city buses.
Around 1990, a crescent-shaped street in
Caen
Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,France) was named after Karl Probst, both extremities of which open on another street named after Commodore John Hughes-Hallett, in a district close to the ''Mémorial pour la Paix'' museum, where a majority of streets commemorate personalities linked with the Second World War, the
Résistance
The French Resistance (french: La Résistance) was a collection of organisations that fought the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazi occupation of France and the Collaborationism, collaborationist Vichy France, Vichy régim ...
, and the subsequent making of the European Community.Caen map, La Poste, 1993.