Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol1-1 > Great european innovators

Peter Petroff
Petroff was a Bulgarian-American inventor, engineer, NASA scientist and adventurer.

He was instrumental in the evolution of the NASA space programme, and was one of the most prolific inventors of the second half of the 20th century. Among his many accomplishments, Petroff developed the world’s first computerised pollution-monitoring system, telemetry devices for the world’s first weather and communications satellites, the world’s first wireless heart monitor, the first digital watch, and many other important devices and methods

He was a native of Bulgaria who moved to Canada and then to the US after World War II. In 1959, he sailed a 65-foot catamaran of his own design to Melbourne, Florida, where he joined the space projects carried out by a precursor of the Harris Corporation. He helped design systems for early weather and communications satellites and organised the company’s semiconductor division. Moving to Huntsville, Alabama, in 1963, Petroff was recruited by Wernher von Braun to work on the new Saturn rocket for the Apollo space programme. During that period, his employers were NASA, and Boeing and Northrop, its contractors.

In 1968, he founded Care Electrics, a high-tech company that developed a wireless heart monitor for hospitals. The company became Electro/ Data, which created the prototype of the digital watch. Marketed by the Hamilton Watch Company as the Pulsar, it sold for $2,100 in 1971. In 1975, Petroff and his sons founded ADS Environmental Services, a maker of computerised pollution monitoring equipment for the world market.

Petroff received numerous honours and awards throughout his professional career. His most unique distinction was to be officially declared an Enemy of the People by the communist regime in Bulgaria, for which he received a death sentence in absentia. The sentence was later lifted.

Louis Pasteur
From the first vaccine for rabies to the pasteurisation process

Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist. He is best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of disease. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurisation. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. Pasteur also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals.

Born in Dole, France, in 1822, he graduated in 1842 from Besancon College Royal de la Franche with honours in physics, mathematics, Latin, and drawing. Louis Pasteur later attended Ecole Normale to study physics and chemistry, specialising in crystals.

In his early research, Pasteur worked with the wine growers of France, helping with the fermentation process to develop a way to pasteurise and kill germs. He was granted US patent 135,245 for “Improvement in Brewing Beer and Ale Pasteurization”. He then worked within the textile industry, finding a cure for a disease affecting silk worms. He also found cures for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies.

The Pasteur Institute was opened in 1888. During Louis Pasteur’s lifetime it was not easy for him to convince others of his ideas, which were controversial in their time, but considered absolutely correct today. He fought to convince surgeons that germs existed and carried diseases, and dirty instruments and hands spread germs and therefore disease. Pasteur’s pasteurisation process killed germs and prevented the spread of disease.

His main contributions to microbiology and medicine were:

• Instituting changes in hospital/medical practices to minimise the spread of disease by microbes or germs.
• Discovering that weak forms of disease could be used as an immunisation against stronger forms and that rabies was transmitted by viruses too small to be seen under the microscopes of the time.
• Introducing the medical world to the concept of viruses.