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.

With 15 years he stepped into apprentice with the engineer Legler in Glarus (hydraulic engineer for the river Linth). He bought a small theodolite and took thereby after short time independently expanded measurements of the flow of the river Linth. Later he joined the Geometerschule (geometer school) at Winterthur and came 1899 as a trainee to the Landestopographie (Swisstopo is the common name 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 already tried 1905 to design a new theodolite with rotable circle with coincidence circle-readings.

In 1907 he left the Landestopographie and moved to Jena, Germany to 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 the year 1921 Wild returned to Switzerland and founded with Dr. R. Helbling, who operated a measurement office, and with the politician Jacob Schmidheiny an own company with the name "Heinrich Wild, Werkstätte für Feinmechanik und Optik" (later known as Wild Heerbrugg, Leica Geosystems, Leica Microsystems, Leica Camera))

At this time he developed the famous universal theodolite Wild T2, the precision theodolite Wild T3 and also the stereo autograph Wild A1 for aerial photo interpretation, beside a number of other measurement instruments.

It may be perhaps typical for the inventor Wild that he worried little about the economical things of its company and this ended finally in the consequence that Wild separated 1932 even from its own company, in order to be able to work as a freelance technical designer and inventor. Up to its death in 1951 he designed the legendary DK1, DKM1, DM2, DKM2, and DKM3 for Kern & Co, Aarau besides other things.