On 1 September 1901 in Lissone, in Brianza, Egidio Brugola was born. If you’ve ever mounted something in your life with those strange hollow hex screws, you know who to thank.
In fact, he is one of the very few inventors to have linked his name to his invention: the Allen key. There are no particularly exciting biographies in circulation: it is known that he was from a petty bourgeois and self-taught family and that after having learned the trade in a mechanical workshop, in 1926 he decided to set up his own business and open his own company of screws and bolts, the OEB, Egidio Brugola workshop. Towards the end of the 1920s he began manufacturing hexagon socket screws: it was a type of screw that already existed but little used.
Egidio added the twisted shank that made those screws perfect for the nascent automobile industry that had the problem of fixing engines. The patent application was submitted only at the end of 1945, after the war that had seen the OEB involved in the war production effort. But it was the Allen wrench that marked the worldwide success of the OEB: after the death of its inventor in 1959, the company passed to his son Giannantonio who led it to his death in 2015. Since the end of the 90s, the OEB no longer produces Allen screws, a product that everyone is able to do, but has dedicated itself to making special screws for car engines, such as the polydrive, patented in 1993, beating a couple of German companies.
.