Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol2-1 > Great European inventors

BULGARIA

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 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.

FRANCE

Louis Pasteur

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 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.

GERMANY

Karl Benz

In 1885, German mechanical engineer, Karl Benz, designed and built the world’s first practical automobile to be powered by an internal combustion engine.

Born in 1844 in Baden Muehlburg, Germany, Karl Friedrich Benz founded his first company in 1871 with partner August Ritter. The “Iron Foundry and Machine Shop” supplied building materials. Benz began his work on a two-stroke engine, in the hope of finding a new income. He received his first patent in 1879.

In 1883, he founded Benz & Company to produce industrial engines in Mannheim, Germany. He then began designing a “motor carriage”, with a four-stroke engine (based on Nicolaus Otto’s patent). Benz designed his engine (958cc, 0.75hp) and the body for the three-wheel vehicle with an electric ignition, differential gears, and water-cooling. The car was first driven in Mannheim in 1885.

On 29 January 1886, he was granted a patent for his gas-fuelled automobile and in July he began selling his automobile to the public. He went on to build his first four-wheeled car in 1891 and Benz and Company went on to become the world’s largest manufacturer of automobiles by 1900

HUNGARY

László József Bíró

Born in 1899, László József Bíró was the inventor of the modern ballpoint pen. He was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. While working as a journalist in Hungary, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudgefree. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen, but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous.

Working with his brother Georg, a chemist, he developed a new tip consisting of a ball that was free to turn in a socket, and as it turned it would pick up ink from a cartridge and then roll to deposit it on the paper. He presented the first production of the ball pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931and patented the invention in Paris in 1938.

In 1943, the brothers moved to Argentina and filed another patent, and formed Biro Pens of Argentina. This new design was licensed by the British, who found the ballpoint pens worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude and so produced them for the Royal Air Force.

In 1950, Marcel Bich bought the patent for the pen, which soon became the main product of his Bic company. Today, a ballpoint pen is still widely referred to as a “biro” in many English-speaking countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, although the word is a registered trademark.

ITALY

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born in 1452 and is credited with being a polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time – and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

Da Vinci was born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence and is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.

Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics and hydrodynamics. In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn.

Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo’s vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. On 17 May 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo’s bridge to span the Golden Horn.

For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most were impractical, like his aerial screw helicopter design that could not provide lift. However, the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated.

SWITZERLAND

Alex Muller

Alex Muller, along with his colleague, Georg Bednorz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his discovery of hightemperature superconductivity in a new class of materials.

Back in the early 1980s, Muller had begun searching for substances that would become superconductive at higher temperatures. The highest critical temperature attainable at that time was about 23K. In 1983, Muller recruited Georg Bednorz to IBM, to help systematically test various oxides. A few recent studies had indicated these materials might superconduct.

In 1986 the two succeeded in achieving superconductivity in a barium-lanthanum-copper oxide at a temperature of 35K. Over the previous 75 years the critical temperature had risen from 11K in 1911 to 23K in 1973, where it had remained for 13 years. Thus 35K was incredibly high by the prevailing standards of superconductivity research.

They reported their discovery in the April 1986 issue of Zeitschrift für Physik (Journal of Physics). Before the end of the year, Shoji Tanaka at the University of Tokyo and then Paul Chu at the University of Houston had each independently confirmed their result. A couple of months later, Chu went on to achieve superconductivity at the unimaginably high temperature of 93K.

In 1987, Muller and Bednorz were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics – the shortest time between the discovery and the prize award for any Nobel. n