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Alexander Peter Gwiazdowski (8 September 1882 - 26 February 1956) was a Polish mechanical engineer.
Born in Suwałki, Poland in 1883, he first moved to the USA in 1905. He graduated from Columbia University with a Mechanical Engineering (M.E.) degree in 1910 and went to live in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. In each city he organized a school for the Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians.
In 1914, Alek became an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Toledo University.
In 1918 Alek returned to Poland as the president of a large cooperative and organized the machine tool industry, second only to the American and Swiss in precision, a technical school, a monthly technical magazine, libraries, and a bank.
On his return to the U.S. he became Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 1928-1934, before moving on to The Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, Ohio.
He returned to Poland in 1935 and worked on his treatise, The Selection of Materials, Manufacturing Processes, and Equipment. In 1937, on the request of the Polish Manufacturers’ Association, he went to Warsaw and established a school and a monthly technical magazine, returning to his hometown of Suwałki to write further mechanical handbooks. There he also started an anti-Nazi resistance group called “Revival of the Nation,” forging documents, collected arms, and acting as couriers to the Warsaw underground. He was also the editor of the group’s underground newspaper. He became trapped in German-occupied Poland, was arrested in May 1941, and spent the remainder of the war in several German prisons in East Prussia.
He returned to the U.S. in 1945 and remained there until his death in 1956 at the age of 72.
