One of the founding fathers of the European Patent Office (EPO), as well as its first President. The patent regime in Europe owes its current shape to the former Dutch resistance fighter who, like many others, emerged from the Second World War determined that a more integrated Europe would lead to a lasting peace. Starting with a meeting in Brussels in 1960, he worked tirelessly, alongside four German counterparts and friends (Kurt Haertel, Albrecht Krieger, Romuald Singer and Klaus Pfanner), to build the European Patent System, which was finally approved by the Munich diplomatic conference of 1973. The EPO, originally designed for a maximum of one-seventh of today’s application volumes, is recognised as a rare, self-financing, European success story.