Background
He was born in the Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, the son of a Schwarzburg court physician.
He was born in the Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, the son of a Schwarzburg court physician.
Mapping
From 1778 he worked as a bookseller in nearby Gotha, where he founded the cartographic publishing firm Justus Perthes Geographische Anstalt Gotha in 1785. On Justus" death in Gotha, Wilhelm took over the firm and laid the foundation of the geographical branch of the business for which it is chiefly famous, by the first publishing of the Hand-Atlas from 1817–1823 after Adolf Stieler (1775–1836). Wilhelm Perthes engaged the collaboration of the most eminent German geographers of the time, including Stieler, Heinrich Berghaus (1797–1884), Christian Gottlieb Reichard (1758–1837), who was associated with Stieler in the compilation of the atlas, Karl Spruner (1803–1892), and Emil von Sydow (1812–1873).
Since 1785 the firm also issued the Almanach de Gotha, a statistical, historical and genealogical annual (in German and French) of the various countries of the world (first published by Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, Gotha, in 1763).
And in 1866 the elaborate Geographisches Jahrbuch was produced under the editorship of Ernst Behm (1830–1884), on whose death it was continued under that of Professor Hermann Wagner.