He went to work for Eastman Kodak after earning a BS from Mines in 1954, marrying his high school sweetheart and serving two years in the Army at the end of the Korean War.
Autofocus, off-the-film metering, auto-film-advance and built-in self-quenching electronic flash: all were featured on the "Project Beehive" camera developed by Peterson and his team of engineers and introduced by Honeywell at photokina in 1972.
For his accomplishments in the field, Peterson was one of four people named Fellows of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1975 (another inductee that year was Ansel Adams).
He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2000 and was posthumously named to Aberdeen Central's Hall of Fame in 2007, together with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Apollo spacecraft guidance system designer John Miller.
He was responsible for the development of two of the most successful products in the history of Fisher-Price Toys, their childproof audiocassette recorder and phonograph player, both introduced in the early 1980s.