History
Heinrich Wild (1877–1951) of Glarus, Switzerland, a leading designer of geodetic and astronomical instruments, began his career as an apprentice surveyor. In 1908, having invented a military rangefinder and convinced Zeiss to manufacture it, Wild moved to the city of Jena and became head of the new Zeiss branch responsible for surveying instruments, GEO.
Wild returned to Switzerland after the First World War. In April 1921, with Colonel Jacob Schmidheiny of Balgach and geologist Dr. Robert Helbling of Flums and with the help of Swiss financiers, he founded the Heinrich Wild, Werkstätte für Feinmechanik und Optik in Heerbrugg in the Rhine Valley. In the early 1930s, having recognized that he was not cut out to be a factory manager, Wild moved to Zurich, severed his connections with the firm in Heerbrugg, and designed instruments for Kern & Co in Aarau. His old firm became Wild Heerbrugg in 1937.
It merged with the optical firm of Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar in 1987, acquired a majority interest in Kern in 1988, was renamed Wild Leitz AG in 1989, and became part of the Leica holding company in 1990. Starting in 1996, the company was divided gradually into smaller units. Thus in 1996, Leica Camera AG was founded, followed in October 1997 by Leica Geosystems AG, and on April 1, 1998 by Leica Microsystems AG. The Swedish company Hexagon AB purchased Leica Geosystems in late 2005.
Today these three companies are all independent public companies. Leica Geosystems produces - in continuation of Wild Heerbrugg - the geodetic instruments and is the global market leader in this section. The main customers of Leica Geosystems are surveyors, manufacturers and GIS companies.
In 2000 Leica Geosystems purchased Cyra Technologies, maker of the Cyrax laser 3D scanner line. In April 2001, Leica Geosystems acquired ERDAS, Inc and LH Systems. ERDAS is a remote sensing software firm, while LH Systems was a photogrammetric software firm. These two companies were merged into software company, ERDAS, Inc., which remains under the ownership of Leica Geosystems. ERDAS purchased Acquis, ER Mapper and IONIC in 2007. This expanded further ERDAS in the remote sensing market, let them enter the enterprise topological GIS market, and expanded their footprint in the image web serving and image enterprise market.
In September 2011, Leica Geosystems Mining announced an exclusive industry partnership with Locata Corporation to provide the mining industry with the world’s only high precision radio positioning system that is not reliant on GPS.
Read more about this topic: Leica Geosystems
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