Petrof 193

About a 100 kilometers east of Prague in Hradec Kralove (The Republic of Czechia) the Petrof factory was established in 1864 by Antonin Petrof. The original factory is still there and has been owned by the Petrof family for five generations. Around 1880 Petrof had an advance in technical developments and earned many prizes for its instruments in international exhibitions. In 1899 the business was appointed as official supplier to the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

In 1948 the factory became state owned by the communist government. Because of this the quality of the instruments aggravated enormously; the managers were not judged by quality, but by production numbers. Actually the largest part of the factory was moved to the Soviet Union in exchange for petrol and gas.

In 1989 a democratic government was installed in Prague and in 1991, after 40 years, the factory came back under the ownership of the Petrof family whereby the emphasis came to lie again on the quality of the production.