Dave Marshall, Walter Bitterlich, Kim Iles and Chris Cieszewski in Salzburg
Walter Bitterlich
1908 - 2008
We have few details to offer, but Helga Bitterlich just emailed us that her father the Austrian forester Walter Bitterlich died on about 9 February, 2008 – just 10 days short of his 100th birthday. A 99.97% completion rate on a century. 1908 was the year that the first long distance radio message was sent from the Eiffel Tower, Henry Ford produced the model T ($850), the Boy Scouts began, Orville Wright crashed his plane to produce the world's first aviation casualty (his passenger), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid were shot, Picasso invented cubism and Claude Monet was still painting water lilies.
Although ill physically in the last 6 months or so, he retained a sharp mind that was wrestling with scientific questions right to the last. It is often said that he is probably the only forester in the world who is known to virtually every other forester, principally because of his invention of Variable Plot sampling (also known to many of us as prism cruising or point sampling).
John Bell, Dave Marshall and Kim Iles who help produce this newsletter had the good luck to spend quite a bit of time with Dr. Bitterlich over the years, especially at some of his major birthdays. A nicer man would be hard to find, and a larger contribution to Forest Inventory would be impossible to imagine.
He managed to live through the Russian Front in WWII just in time to be shipped to Normandy to face the allied invasion. Even during the fighting he was inventing and thinking. It was not just Variable Plot Sampling that he offered the world, but inventions of snowmobiles, garden tools and machines to produce pleasant curves for furniture. The Relascope, of course, is the invention that so many of us know best, and it was made possible by the manufacturing skill of his life-long friend Benno Hesske. Walter’s book “The Relascope Idea” is full of credit to other people, which was typical of our experience with this extraordinary man.
He lived for much of his professional life in Salzburg while he raised a family of 4 and taught at the forestry school in Vienna. He took up ice dancing when he was 70, as part of his life-long fitness regime. He did that until he was about 90 when, as he said “I could not longer lie convincingly to my lady partners about my age – they worried I would fall – how silly”. During his last few years he moved back to Reutte, Austria where he was born, and near where several generations of foresters in his family had worked.
It has been said that “the mark of genius is not perfection, but originality”. In our experience the originality of Walter Bitterlich was unmatched, and the practical affect is well appreciated by anyone who has had to put in fixed plots instead of swinging a prism or Relascope. He changed forest sampling forever.
We enjoyed him greatly.
We will miss him dearly.
In case you want to send a note to Salzburg, you can use this mailing
address.
The Bitterlich Family,
c/o Sigrid Prosser
Rennbahnstrasse 4a
5020 Salzburg, Austria