On 29 October 1908 the engineer Samuel David Camillo Olivetti, known only as Camillo Olivetti, born 40 years earlier in Ivrea, owner of a factory of electrical equipment, the Cgs (Centimeter Gram Second) based in Milan, inspired, it seems, also by what he had learned during a year spent in California, in Palo Alto, the the heart of what many years later would become Silicon Valley, established in his hometown the limited partnership Ing. C. Olivetti & C, or “the first national typewriter factory”, as stated on the sign of the workshop in Ivrea, 500 square meters of red bricks, 20 employees and a starting production of 20 machines per week.
Treccani says: “At that time, typing machines in the offices they were produced by the American companies Remington and Underwood and, in Europe, almost only by German companies. When, twenty years later, now an established industrialist in the sector, Camillo paid public homage to the Novara lawyer Giuseppe Ravizza (1811-1885), inventor in 1855 of the scribe harpsichord (so called for its shape), an apparatus that even preceded the first typewriter in the world, the one patented in 1867 in the United States by Christopher L. Scholes, will indicate as the root cause of Ravizza’s lack of luck the historically Italian limit that an invention cannot ripen and bear the fruits of which it is capable, if it is not integrated by a healthy and adequate industrial body “.
Of course, October 29 is also the celebrated anniversary of the first connection of a network that later became the Internet in 1969. But what happened that day in 1908 in Ivrea remains a milestone for innovation not only in Italy, the beginning of a glorious and beautiful story, which ended badly, this is true, but there are Oscar-winning films without a happy ending that do not would you stop reviewing. AND the Olivetti saga is an Oscar-winning story. Watch it again in the TV series that is on RaiPlay, read the passionate fictional books by Maurizio Gazzarri on some of the fabulous machines invented in Ivrea, do not forget the little book P101 by Piergiorgio Perotto on the (neglected) invention of the first personal computer in history; and if after all this you are left with the question of how and why Italy was able to ruin such a heritage, dive into reconstruction of the “Olivetti case” made by Merlyle Secrest. In short, on 29 October 1908 a story began that we must not forget to understand the potential of Italian innovation and why we sometimes fail to notice it.
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