Every gun owner has that one item in the safe that makes the barbecue guests go quiet. A pair of goggles with a single cyclops lens staring back at you does the job nicely. One look at this setup and your first thought is probably not Swiss precision engineering. It is The Silence of the Lambs from 1991, the Jonathan Demme thriller where Jodie Foster's FBI trainee Clarice Starling stumbles through a pitch-black basement while serial killer Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, played by Ted Levine, watches her every move through night vision goggles. Yes, that Buffalo Bill. Not William F. Cody, whose Wild West show toured Europe with plenty of rifles but not a single image intensifier.
What we actually have here is a Wild BIG 2 from Wild Heerbrugg, the Swiss company founded in 1921 by surveyor Heinrich Wild and better known for theodolites, rangefinders and aerial cameras. We also found the operating instructions, as if the device was brand new, so we thought it would be a great idea to share and preserve for history.
The BIG 2 served with the Swiss Army, border guards, police units and even game wardens. Behind that single 24.9 mm f/1.29 objective sits an 18 mm second-generation tube with a microchannel plate, automatic brightness control and bright-point protection, feeding a binocular eyepiece with a 41-degree field of view at essentially 1x magnification. Focus runs from 25 cm (about 10 inches) to infinity, and when the moon calls in sick, a built-in 830 nm IR LED fills in. It runs 40 hours or more on AA batteries, operates from -45°C to +45°C (-49°F to 113°F) and survives two hours at 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) underwater. Can you say that about your phone?
The manual also opens with a warning in capital letters: never insert two 3 volt batteries, because the excess voltage will fry the tube, and Wild Heerbrugg takes no responsibility. One lithium AA or two regular alkalines, and that is it.
For today's TFB Photo of the Day, the goggles teamed up with something a bit younger: a Glock 45, the 9mm crossover with a compact slide on a full-size frame, wearing an A-TEC suppressor and an IR lamp from irbulbs, sourced from the U.K. many years ago. The Glock and Wild Bill 2 share one commonality - there’s only one hole out! The best part is that the whole NV system is up and running and still works rather well. We think the goggles are from around the 1980s.
The Wild name faded away after the company was folded into what became Leica around 1990, and it seems they are still in the same town, together with Safran Vectronix. Some things in Switzerland simply never stop running. So, what is the oldest piece of night vision still working in your safe?
All images by Eric B @ TFB
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