Frank Arnold Perret was an American electrical engineer and inventor, he devoted himself rather late to volcanology. However, his work on Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli and Kilauea soon made him famous. Frank A. Perret first worked for Thomas Edison in his laboratory in New York. He then founded a company specializing in the manufacture of electric motors.
He had to give up this activity in 1904 due to poor health, to devote himself to volcanology. He arrived in Martinique in 1929, in the middle of the 1929-1932 eruption.
His diagnosis of the eruptive activity in progress, of a different nature from that of the beginning of 1902, will very quickly allow the evacuated populations to return to the localities of the North, and to resume a normal activity. His work on the erupting volcano, observing very closely the burning avalanche clouds, contributed to reassure the population of Saint-Pierre.
At the same time, he also studied a volcano/seismic crisis at the Soufriere Hills of Montserrat, in the Caribbean archipelago.
Frank A. Perret spent nearly a decade in Martinique, and particularly in Saint-Pierre, where he was much appreciated by the Pierrotins. He had the Volcanological Museum built on the site of the Esnotz battery, which now bears his name.
He received from the Ministry of Colonies the sum of 30,000 French francs in order to bequeath to the city of Saint-Pierre this museum that he had built.
On January 12, 1943, he died in New York at the age of 76.