In the spring of 1908, Heinrich Wild moved his wife and 5 children to Jena,
Germany and accepted employment with Carl Zeiss as manager of their new
department, Geo Carl Zeiss. Prior to this time, Zeiss had produced no
geodetic instruments.
He first designed and fabricated instruments for leveling. Later, transits
and theodolites were produced. His goals were to make available small,
light weight, stable instruments that maintained their adjustments over long
periods of time, and were easy to understand and operate.
These instruments were very successful and Wild
was becoming well respected
and recognized, world wide.
During this time, Wild devised many new features and improvements such as:
The anallactic telescope of constant length with
internal focusing
Device for centering the bubble on
leveling-instruments by making apparent coincidence of its two ends as
viewed in a prism
Cylindrical steel main axis
Dust-tight arrangement for foot screws
The plane-parallel glass plate as an optical
micrometer for geodetic instruments. First applied to levels
Divisions on an Invar band stretched by springs
and attached to a
precision leveling rod
At the close of the first World War in 1919,
living conditions in Germany became very difficult. Wild elected to return
to Switzerland. He resigned his
permanent employment with Zeiss at this time and agreed to continue with them
until 1921 as a contract consultant.
Below
a Th1, one of the instruments developed by H.Hild for Zeiss
