Engineer and cryptology pioneer Boris Hagelin founded Crypto AG in Zug in 1952 at the age of 60. He had left his native Sweden and set off for neutral and autonomous Switzerland to build up a company for manufacturing and selling the encryption units he himself had developed.  His reasons for choosing Zug were sound. At the time, the region had an excellent reputation far beyond the Swiss border as a production location for high precision mechanics.

The C-52 was the first machine fully produced in Switzerland and enjoyed great success on the market. It was an advance on the C-36, which Boris Hagelin had already sold prior to World War II to many nations and, under licence (type M-209), to the US Armed Forces. A number of further models were created in the following years at Crypto AG from the design elements of the C-36.

When electronics came to increasingly dominate encryption machine technology, Boris Hagelin retired from his active role in the company, but he remained keenly interested in the progress and happenings at Crypto AG until his death.

His legacy, the corporate logo (an orange “H” from the first letter of Hagelin, his surname), continues to embody the corporate values of Crypto AG:

Security Competency – Innovation – A Commitment to Service

Crypto AG – To Remain Sovereign