Duane D. Pearsall

Pearsall was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on March 3, 1922.[1] He attended high school in Keego Harbor, Michigan and attended General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) from 1940 to 1942.[1] He served in World War II from 1942 to 1945 in the Naval Air Corps, first as a navigator on a submarine patrol and later as a pilot.[2] He married Marjorie Lee Fewel on July 22, 1944.[3] After the war, he attended the University of Denver and graduated in 1947 with a Bachelor of Arts and Science.[1][2] He then served in the Naval Air Reserve at Buckley Field from 1948 to 1954.[2]

Pearsall worked with Honeywell Corporation as a heating and air conditioning sales engineer for seven years before founding the Pearsall Company in 1955.[3] Pearsall founded Statitrol Corporation in Lakewood, Colorado, in 1963.[3][4] A few months later Lyman Blackwell, one of Pearsall's engineers at Statitrol, improvised a test to measure the flow of ions in an airstream discharging from a generator.[5] When a technician, smoking nearby, casually exhaled smoke into the fan inlet of the generator, the ion meter pegged.[5] Pearsall immediately realized that the basic ionization technology of this device could also be used for smoke detection.[5] This accidental discovery was similar to a discovery made by Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger in the late 1930s.[6] In 1965 Pearsall began the long process to develop and market a home smoke detector powered by a battery which could be easily installed and replaced.[7][8] These first units were dubbed "SmokeGard 700",[9] Pearsall was awarded a design patent for this in 1973,[10] and began mass-producing them in 1975.[8] Shortly afterwards, he began working with the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).[3] His work with NFPA would eventually lead to the change of the uniform building codes to require smoke detectors in new construction.[3] Statitrol sold the smoke detector invention to Emerson Electric in 1980.[11]

Pearsall sold Statitrol in 1977.[3] Later into his life Pearsall founded several companies and retired three separate times.[2] He was a spokesman and advocate for American small business, which he considered to be the "backbone of the nation's economy".[1] He traveled to Washington, D.C. numerous times to testify before Congressional committees on small business issues.[1] Pearsall helped found the Small Business Council of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1976, and was chairman of the Colorado Small Business Council in 1979.[1] From 1975 to 1978, he served as a director of the Denver Chamber of Commerce, and from 1982 to 1989, he was a director of the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry, serving as its chairman from 1985 to 1986.[1] In 1983, Pearsall co-founded Columbine Venture Funds, an organization specializing in new technology located in Denver.[1]

Pearsall and his wife Marge lived in Dillon, Colorado, from 2000 to 2007.[1] They moved to Denver in 2007.[1] Pearsall died on April 11, 2010, at his home in Denver.[1][2]