Toma Petre Ghițulescu

Toma Petre Ghițulescu was born into a refugee family from Austro-Hungarian Transylvania. He attended the Polytechnic School in Bucureşti from 1921-25. During this time he worked as a geological research collaborator for the first time in the Ore Mountains, located in the Carpathian Mountains. He was excited about the possibilities opened by geophysics, and went to the German cities of Freiburg and Potsdam for further studies. In 1927 he was appointed lecturer at the Polytechnic School in Bucureşti, where he became the first lecturer in applied geophysics in Romania. He worked together with his friends Ion Gavăt and Mircea Socolescu, all geologists and geophysicists, and members of the Romanian bob team at St. Moritz in 1928. The Romanian bobsleigh team in St. Moritz in 1928 marked the first Romanian participation in Olympic Winter Games.

Ghițulescu was the founder of the Romanian Society of Geophysics. He produced important geological maps and also held high positions in the mining industry. In 1940, he became an adviser to the Ministry of National Economy and later Secretary of State. From 1948-62 he spent 14 years in prison and a labor camp as an outspoken opponent of the communist and Soviet Russian measures in the gold mining industry. After another three years of house arrest in Brad, he returned to his geological work, conducted major studies, and wrote a number of handbooks for the mining industry. He died, completely forgotten, in the tiny room in which he had lived for the last 17 years.