Karl Probst

Karl Probst was an American freelance engineer and automotive designer, born in 1883 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who studied engineering at Ohio State University and graduated in 1906. Early in his career he designed the original Milburn Light Electric. In 1940 the American Bantam Car Company recruited him to help win a United States Army contract for a lightweight reconnaissance vehicle that could carry troops and equipment across rugged terrain. Working from the specifications Bantam had supplied, he drafted the design in two days starting on 17 June 1940, and Bantam's first hand-built prototype was running by 21 September 1940, just meeting the Army's forty-nine-day deadline before delivery to the Quartermaster Corps for testing at Camp Holabird in Maryland. That vehicle, the Bantam Reconnaissance Car, was the first prototype of the World War II jeep, and Probst is credited with its design drawings. He died in Dayton, Ohio, in 1963.