Theodor Wilhelm Petersen was born in about 1837 in Flensburg, Prussia.  He moved to England, became naturalised, and by the 1870s was a hardware merchant in Newhall Hill, Birmingham.  In the Census (1891), he was enumerated at Edgbaston and described himself as a ‘general hardware export merchant.  Vice-consul for Sweden and Norway’.  He sourced table cutlery, butchers’, and Bowie knives from Trafalgar Works, Wellington Street.  Petersen made sales trips to America.  In 1896, Petersen & Co offered Trafalgar Works, 58 Wellington Street, for sale as suitable for cutlery or similar trades.  The premises were next to Harrison Fisher.   

In 1897, a Petersen partnership with N. F. Danielson and John J. Button was dissolved.  Petersen then announced the intention to register a private limited company, but no futher details have been found (Sheffield Independent, 24 March 1897).  The business was not listed in Sheffield after about 1901.  Theodor Wilhelm Petersen, merchant, The Cedars, Ampton Road, Edgbaston, died on 17 February 1918.  He left £42,701.  His trade mark was a moose – granted in 1893 – and the number ‘469’, formerly owned by F. C. Harrison.