Marinus Vertregt

In 1917 he departed for the Dutch East Indies (now called Indonesia) and was employed at several sugar factories of the Handels Vereeniging Amsterdam (H.V.A.)

In 1943, during the Second World War, Vertregt, his wife and his daughter were put in a Japanese internment camp, until their liberation in 1945.

In 1947 he returned to Indonesia to take on the job of director of the biggest sugar factory in Java, Djatiroto.

Returning to Holland, Vertregt sought other employment and in 1952 became director of the newly founded Institute for Technical Courses, a sister organisation of the Bond voor Materialenkennis (Society for the Knowledge of Materials).

The new design, called Muis (Dutch for Mouse) would be using a four-step rocket and would stay in an orbit at a height of 500 km.

In 1958 he was appointed Fellow of the BIS on account of several original scientific articles in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society .

In 1959 his book Grondbeginselen van de Ruimtevaart [1] appeared, followed in 1960 by an English translation: Principles of Astronautics[2] and in 1965 in a much enlarged second edition.

From early youth he had learned English, French and German, and later in life he added Italian and Spanish.

Wanting to make this accumulated knowledge useful, he described the history of the civilisation of the countries of the Mediterranean and Western Europe in his book The Threefold Way.