Heinrich Wild

Heinrich Wild (Mitlödi, Canton of Glarus, November 15, 1877 – Baden, Switzerland, December 26, 1951) was a Swiss inventor, designer and founder of Wild Heerbrugg.

At 15 years of age, Wild became an apprentice with the engineer Legler in Glarus (hydraulic engineer for the Linth River). He bought a small theodolite, and after a short time independently made expanded measurements of the flow of the river Linth. Later Wild joined the Geometerschule (geometer school) at Winterthur and came in 1899 as a trainee to the Landestopographie (Swisstopo is a popular designation for the Swiss Federal Office of Topography) in Bern. Due to his bad experiences with the high mountain triangulation with a theodolite of conventional design, he tried in 1905 to design a new theodolite with rotable circle with coincidence circle-readings.

In 1907 he left the Landestopographie and moved to Jena, Germany, where he joined the company Carl Zeiss to build up a new department for producing geodetic instruments. He began with the development of levelling instruments and designed later also a new theodolite, the Th I.

In 1921 Wild returned to Switzerland and founded with Dr. R. Helbling, who operated a measurement office, and with the politician Jacob Schmidheiny, the company Heinrich Wild, Werkstätte für Feinmechanik und Optik (later known as Wild Heerbrugg, Wild-Leitz AG,Leica Geosystems, Leica Microsystems, Leica Camera).

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