Peter Petroff
Peter Dimitroff Petroff (also Petar Dimitrov Petrov, Petar Dimitrov or Petrov, Bulgarian Петър Димитров Петров; born October 21, 1919 in Brestovitza, Bulgaria, † February 27, 2003 in Huntsville, Alabama ) was a Bulgarian- American engineer, inventor and adventurers.
The son of a Bulgarian Orthodox priest Peter Petroff grew up in the southern Bulgarian city Brestovitza in modest circumstances. His training at a seminary in 1939, he broke off to join the French Foreign Legion. In defense of the Maginot Line against the German Wehrmacht, he came in 1940 in German captivity. After his release in March 1941, he returned to Bulgaria and entered as an officer in the - a Bulgarian army - then allied with the German Reich. His tasks of service was as a palace guard of the King Boris III. of Bulgaria. Before the advancing Red Army in 1944, he fled again to Germany, where he studied in Darmstadt and Stuttgart, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and construction, and in 1947 graduated with diploma.
In 1951 he went with his wife Helen, first to Toronto, then to the Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay (Labrador ) and Thule Air Base ( Greenland), where he worked for the U.S. Air Force as a civil engineer. Starting in 1956, followed bridges and power plant projects in Indochina. In 1959 he sailed on a catamaran from own production to Melbourne / Florida, where he at the company Radiation Inc. (now Harris Corporation) came in contact with the space technology. Here he was responsible for the development of semiconductors for weather and communications satellites.
1963 he moved to Huntsville, where he was instrumental in the development of the Saturn rocket for the Apollo program NASA under Wernher von Braun.
In 1968, Petroff founded a first company, Care Electrics, that developed the first wireless heart monitor for Hospitals among others. 1971 The company, meanwhile renamed Electro / Data introduced the world's first digital watch ( " Hamilton Pulsar " ) at a price of 2100 dollars on the market.
In 1975 he founded with his sons Alan, Ralph and Mark the company ADS Environmental Services, the systems developed for computer-based pollution measurements. 1989 ADS was sold to a Swedish investor. Also in the next company of his sons, Time Domain, which deals with ultra-wideband technologies, Petroff worked until his death in 2003 as a consultant.
Petroff was enthusiastic about since his time in Germany for shipbuilding; his first self-built boat was built in 1947. During his life, he is a total of 60 ships designed, built or renovated, including the Gemini II, which is a floating orphanage in Central America in use since 2001.