ITALY 01From Imports to Domestic Production: From Unification to the Second World War

Armories and railway works: the age of imported machines (1848–1898)

Torino before unification

Italy's engineering industry began in Piemonte in the northwest. In Torino, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia before unification, most machine-building work in 1848 was in state establishments: the Royal Arsenal (Regio Arsenale), the arms factory at Valdocco, the artillery works at Borgo Dora and the railway workshops, employing 1,500–2,000 people in all. That was few compared with the textile mills, but the craftsmen trained here became the foundation of the later engineering industry^[1].

In the 1850s and 1860s private engineering works appeared in Torino: Bertetti e Cavallo, Benech, Colla, Biolley, Polla, Negro, Decker and others, each with about 50 to 120 workers, whose customers were the army and the railways. They made machine tools too, but as general works that made all kinds of machines, not as specialist machine tool makers. The researcher Micheletti calls this period the “military phase”^[1]. In Genova, Ansaldo was founded in 1852; it started with locomotives and later became a large shipbuilding and armaments company^[2].

Terni: a state rifle factory lined with British machines

After unification, the state equipped factories to make the army's weapons itself. In the early 1880s, Greenwood & Batley of Leeds, England, delivered about 900 machine tools to the state rifle factory at Terni in central Italy, for about $386,000. The automatic screw machines were all of that company's design too^[3]. Greenwood & Batley was known for machines for arms factories, and it also delivered machines such as a universal gear cutter for helical gears to the army's precision works in Rome^[3]. Equipping a whole factory with one company's machines meant buying from abroad, along with the machines, the very system of “making interchangeable parts by machine.”

In the same year, 1884, an iron and steel company was founded in Terni to make armor plate for navy warships at home. The state backed it with advance payments and a promise to buy 8,500 t of armor plate^[4]. Having the iron and machines for weapons at home was a major goal of industry in this era.

Ansaldi, Züst and Dubosc: the first companies selling machine tools

In the 1880s, with the extension of the railways, the spread of steel, demand for textile machinery and the spread of steam engines and electricity, more and more Piedmontese companies began making machine tools, which until then had been almost entirely imported. At the 1884 national exhibition in Torino, 12 Piedmontese companies showed metalworking and woodworking machines^[1]. The same year, Michele Ansaldi built a machine tool factory in Torino. By 1891 it was making engine lathes, milling machines and grinders, and in 1899 it moved to a new 25,000 m² plant with 300 workers. It is a different company from Ansaldo of Genova^[1].

In the state statistics of 1889, Torino had 81 metal and engineering establishments employing 8,766 people, of whom 2,760 were in four military establishments. Of the private firms that also made machine tools, only four had more than 50 workers: Colla (83), Carrera e Prata (70), Ansaldi (60) and Tarizzo (60)^[1]. Most were still small shops, and employees repeatedly left to start new companies, which then merged again. Rolfo writes that the later car industry made great use of this pattern of technology and people circulating within the region^[1].

At Intra, on the shore of Lago Maggiore in the north, an engineering works dating from 1850 passed through Güller & Züst and in 1893 became Roberto Züst's machine tool works and foundry^[1]. In Torino, Edmondo Dubosc began precision engineering work in 1888, bringing out an electrically driven shaper in 1901 and an electrically driven milling machine in 1906^[1].

Milano and Genova: the locomotive works

In Milano in November 1886, Ernesto Breda took over Elvetica, an old foundry and engineering works, and founded a company. Breda was an engineer who had toured foreign railways; he replaced some of the old machines with new American-made ones and concentrated on building locomotives. A company document of 1895 says that Italy's engineering industry had “only about ten years of history”^[5]. Even so, in 1891 it won a tender for 22 locomotives for Romania, and in 1908 it delivered its 1,000th locomotive. The Milano works had about 4,000 people by 1904 and expanded with a new plant in Sesto San Giovanni^[5]. Big locomotive works were major buyers of lathes, boring machines and planers, and also places where people learned how to use machine tools.

The car and the first specialist makers (1899–1914)

Fiat and the car boom

On July 11, 1899, Giovanni Agnelli and others founded Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) in Torino. When it began building its first cars at the Corso Dante works in 1900 it had about 150 skilled workers, but it widened its work to cars, trucks, trams and marine engines^[6]. In 1905 the machine tool maker Michele Ansaldi joined forces with Agnelli, and the Ansaldi works became Fiat-Ansaldi. Fiat used the machines from this works for itself and stopped selling them outside. The works went to Ansaldo of Genova in 1916 and back to Fiat in 1923, becoming the plant of Fiat Grandi Motori, the large-engine maker^[1].

At the start of the 20th century, a car boom in Italy produced more than 50 car companies, 28 of them in Torino. Most machine tools were imported: imports in 1905–07 came to about 50 million lire, mostly from the US. When the American investigator visited, the Fiat works had 649 machine tools, 350 of them new American machines^[1]. When car companies collapsed one after another in the crisis of 1907, good-quality imported used machines came onto the market and imports fell, giving domestic makers a tailwind. Even so, the investigator judged that only four makers were of industrial scale by international standards: Ansaldi (830 people), Dubosc, Savant and Züst^[1].

1909: the factories an American investigator saw

In May 1909 Godfrey L. Carden, an investigator for the US Department of Commerce and Labor, toured Italian factories and wrote a report aimed at selling American machine tools. The report is a valuable primary source on the inside of Italian factories at the time.

Itala, a car company in Torino, had 480 machine tools in a works of about 800 people, the great majority American-made. Brake hubs were done on Gisholt turret lathes, differential parts on Potter & Johnston automatics, gears on Bilgram gear cutters and piston finishing on Landis grinders. There were also Reinecker and Loewe machines from Germany, small Herbert turret lathes from Britain, and at least three Dubosc gear cutters from Italy^[3]. To cut large numbers of car parts to the same shape, highly specialized machines developed in America were indispensable.

By contrast, at the state rifle factory in Terni, 1,400 machine tools stood in new electrically driven buildings, yet only 10 were American. Most were Greenwood & Batley machines of the 1880s and German machines. Power came from eight water turbines of about 1,000 hp, and about 500 people worked there^[3]. The army's precision works in Rome (Laboratorio di Precisione, about 150 people) made precision artillery equipment such as rangefinders, mostly with German machines. The Italian-made machines were Züst lathes and milling machines, Ansaldi planers and Dubosc machines. The investigator notes that an American Bilgram gear cutter carried the nameplate of its Italian sales agent^[3]. Even within Italian factories, there was a clear division: American machines for cars, German and British machines for weapons.

Dubosc's gear cutters

One Italian machine tool of this era that also sold abroad was the Dubosc gear cutter. The table compiled by the researcher Micheletti says that Dubosc built a spiral bevel gear cutter in 1906^[1], and Dubosc, which became a joint-stock company with investment from Fiat in 1906, had about 200 people by 1908 and was exporting bevel gear cutters to Britain and Germany^[1]. Bevel gears for car differentials were among the most difficult parts of the day. Building the machines to cut them themselves was an achievement only Torino, the car city, could have made (for the lineage of gear machines, see Chapter 7).

The 1911 exhibition and the division of imports

At the 1911 Torino International Exhibition, about 150 companies exhibited in the metalworking machinery section, but almost all were American and German; the Piedmontese companies were 13, including Fiat, Dubosc, Savant and Ansaldi^[1]. While the US and Germany had several machine tool makers with more than 1,000 employees, in Italy even companies with more than 100 were few^[1]. On Olivetti's stand at this exhibition, alongside its first typewriter, the M1, were the machine tools and dies of its own design used to make its parts^[8].

In 1913 US machine tool exports to Italy were £54,000, Germany's £319,000 and Britain's £18,000^[1]. A 1939 American study says that before World War I Italy bought about two-thirds of its machine tools from Germany and Austria-Hungary^[9].

World War I and the interwar years (1915–1934)

Industrial mobilization: the state designates the factories

When Italy entered the war in 1915, a supreme committee for the supply of arms and munitions and an undersecretariat were set up on July 9, with the artillery general Alfredo Dallolio heading the undersecretariat. Regulations of August 22 launched “industrial mobilization” (Mobilitazione industriale): the “auxiliary plants” (stabilimenti ausiliari) designated by the state were barred from striking but in return received good prices, allocations of materials, advance payments, help with depreciating new equipment and tax relief. In June 1917 the undersecretariat became the Ministry of Arms and Munitions^[10].

In Torino almost everything, from car companies, foundries and machine tool makers down to small machine shops, was designated an auxiliary plant. Mass production of shells and weapons needed more machine tools and tools and a big leap in technology, but with the war, German machines no longer came. American exports went to France, where much of the machine tool industry was in occupied territory. Under these conditions, new companies were born in Italy, and companies from other industries took up machine tools. In 1917 Giuseppe Landriani founded a tool company, and the printing press maker Nebiolo made nothing but machine tools throughout the war^[1]. A 1939 American study also says that being unable to buy machine tools from abroad helped start domestic production^[9].

Specialist makers born after the war

Companies that profited from the war grew stronger, and after the war Fiat became a big company with many businesses. France received large numbers of machine tools from Germany as reparations, and its domestic demand vanished for a while; Italy had no such problem, and specialist machine tool makers sprang up one after another^[1]. In 1919 Ettore Buzzi, who had worked at Züst, founded a lathe company in Intra, and in 1921 the grinder makers Giustina (Borgomanero) and Tacchella (Cassine) were born. In 1922 the chuck makers Mario Pinto and Vagnone & Boeri appeared in Torino, and in 1928 the chuck maker Gamfior^[1]. It is striking that specialist makers of important accessories such as chucks, not just of machine tools themselves, were born in the same period.

In Verona in the northeast, PAMA was founded in 1926; it later became a maker of large horizontal boring mills (it moved to Rovereto in Trentino in the 1980s)^[12][13][14]. In October 1930 Ficep, a maker of shears and punching machines for steel, was born in Gazzada in the province of Varese^[15], and in 1932 Renato Mandelli's precision parts shop in Piacenza^[16]. Near Torino, the gear shaving machine maker Sicmat appeared in 1932 and the grinder maker Favretto in 1934^[1].

Lingotto and Adriano Olivetti's American journey

In 1923 Fiat's Lingotto plant opened. Designed by Giacomo Matté-Trucco, it was a multi-story plant with a test track on the roof. It adopted the flow production Agnelli had seen at Ford's plants in the US, and some 25 years after its founding Fiat had 27,500 employees^[6]. Torino's machine tool companies gathered not only in the old Barriera di Milano district but also near Fiat's Lingotto and the Lancia works^[1].

At Olivetti, the typewriter company in Ivrea, Adriano, son of the founder Camillo, stayed in the US from July 1925 to January the following year and visited about 100 plants, including Ford's Highland Park. After returning he pushed ahead with rationalizing assembly times and methods^[11]. Learning from America widened from buying machines to learning how to build factories themselves.

OMO: a workshop that built the company's own machines

From its early days Olivetti had its own people design special machine tools for mass-producing typewriters^[7]. In 1917 it built two 10 t presses for its own use, and in the 1920s it also built cutting machines for itself^[1]. As the company grew, Camillo Olivetti wanted a small place where he could try things out himself, and in October 1926 he set up a small workshop in a corner of the Ivrea plant with about six lathes, a milling machine and six skilled men. It became OMO (Officina Meccanica Olivetti, the Olivetti machine works)^[8]. At first its work was making jigs and tools for mass production and building prototypes of new typewriters. Sources differ: the Treccani biographical dictionary says it “was created in 1924 as an experimental department and became independent as a company in 1926,” while the archives say it “was born in October 1926 and became an independent division in 1936”^[7][8].

The first exports and IRI

The first exports of Italian-made machine tools are dated to 1925–30^[1]. Imports continued too: in 1925 an expansion by one large Italian engineering company brought in many lathes from the US, and in 1926 Germany sent many lathes to Italy as World War I reparations^[9]. The 1939 American study judged that Italy could make general-purpose machine tools itself, but not machines for mass production^[9].

The Great Depression turned the company shares held by Italy's big banks into a burden. On January 23, 1933 the state created the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) to take them over, and in 1937 made it a permanent public body^[18]. The state had already taken over Ansaldo's shares in 1921^[2]. Big shipbuilding, steel and engineering companies came under state ownership, setting the shape of postwar heavy industry.

Self-sufficiency and World War II (1935–1945)

Sanctions and autarky

When the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia in 1935, the Fascist government stepped up its policy of self-sufficiency (autarky)^[19]. On July 14 of the same year a general commissariat for war production was set up to control military production, headed by Dallolio^[10]. Rearmament increased arms production and with it demand for machine tools, while sanctions made imports harder, giving domestic makers a tailwind^[1]. According to an American study, imports of lathes and grinders from the US for munitions had increased in 1935^[9].

New companies multiplied too. Bossetti of Novara, with investment from the machine tool dealer Mascherpa, concentrated on lathes, bringing out the single-pulley lathe Tam under the Maxnovo name in 1937 and the multi-tool lathe XPU in 1940, and grew from about 50 people to about 200^[1]. In 1938 CMT, later known for its Ursus lathes, appeared in Tortona in the province of Alessandria, and the grinder maker Giustina moved to Torino and began making gear cutters too^[1].

OMO's machines for sale

In the mid-1930s OMO changed from a workshop serving the company's own plant into a division that built and sold machine tools. Its first machine for sale was the TS1 bench drill of 1936, with two spindles and 36 speeds, for mass-producing precision parts for office machines, sewing machines and electrical appliances. It was followed by the rigid, heavy-cutting plano-miller FP0 (1937), designed by Camillo Olivetti himself; the TMV1 multi-spindle automatic drill, which drilled 12 holes at once with 12 spindles (1938); the FP2 (1939), built until 1950; and the R3 universal grinder, which could switch easily between internal and external grinding^[8]. OMO's model of selling to outsiders the machines it had perfected for its own mass production is, alongside Fiat having its own machine tool works, a prime example of the Italian tradition of “users becoming makers” (for OMO after the war, see Chapter 2).

1938 in numbers: half of demand imported

For all the new companies, Italian machine tool production in 1938 was 224 million lire, with exports of just over 6 million lire, and domestic production covered only half of domestic demand. Imports came mainly from Germany, a political ally that technically had caught up with the US after the 1920s^[1]. As before World War I, Italian factories again came to depend on German machines.

The war and Fiat's orders

In May 1939 Fiat's Mirafiori plant opened^[20][6]. When Italy entered the war in 1940, the grinder maker CIMAT and the chuck maker OMLAT were born in Torino, and in 1942 the chuck maker Autoblok^[1].

Fiat's machine tool orders of 1942 show the state of the industry at the time well. The largest share went to Minganti of Bologna: 109 lathes, 13 Heald-type grinders and 6 Gleason-type gear cutters. Buzzi of Intra received 62 Potter-type lathes, and Ceruti, Nebiolo, Giustina, Sicmat and Rasetti also got orders^[1]. Rolfo reads two things from this: that Fiat did not insist on its home city of Torino but ordered from whoever could build the machines, and that American machines were so much the model that the types were called by the names of famous American makers^[1].

Adriano Olivetti's “The Machine Tool Problem”

This backwardness was debated within the industry at the time. In December 1941 Adriano Olivetti wrote “The Machine Tool Problem” in the journal Tecnica e Organizzazione, saying that machines designed independently in Italy, or genuinely improving on foreign machines, were “very few.” The causes he named were the poor quality of cast iron and the lack of companies specializing in machine tool accessories and components^[1]. The specialist makers of chucks and other items born during the war were partly meant to fill this gap^[1].

The end of the war reached the factories too. In March 1943, strikes against the war spread through Torino's factories, and workers of Rasetti, a machine tool maker with about 800 people, were in the front line^[1]. The steel tube plant Innocenti had built at Apuania in 1939 ran only in 1942–43, and in 1943 the German army dismantled it and carried it out of the country^[17]. Meanwhile, in the province of Alessandria, the lathe maker Graziano and the gear cutter and grinder maker PTP were born during the war, and together with Tacchella and CMT a machine tool district was growing^[1].

What changed in shop-floor machining

Power: factories driven by hydroelectricity. From the end of the 19th century, electricity generated from mountain water powered industry in northern Italy. Rolfo names skipping the steam engine stage and going straight to electricity as a turning point in Torino's industrialization^[1]. In 1909 the Terni rifle factory drove its machines with electricity from eight water turbines, and the precision works in Rome also drove its overhead shafts and belts with electric motors^[3]. Maxnovo's 1937 Tam lathe was a “single-pulley” lathe (with one belt pulley), leaving speed changes to gears inside the headstock instead of shifting the belt on a cone pulley^[1].

Machines: buying the right machine for each job. At Itala's works in 1909, hubs were done on turret lathes, small parts on automatics, gears on gear cutters and pistons on grinders, with highly specialized machines bought from the US for each job^[3]. It was a shift from the era of cutting everything on an engine lathe to the era of choosing a machine for each job. The lineage of lathes is covered in Chapter 4, grinding machines in Chapter 6.

Gears: the field that lagged furthest. Despite the early example of Dubosc's bevel gear cutters, in the 1930s Italy could not make enough gear cutters and imported expensive ones from the US^[9]. Sicmat's shaving machines of 1932 and the “Gleason-type” gear cutters Fiat ordered from Minganti in 1942 were moves to fill that gap^[1].

Accessories: chucks and tools. From the 1910s to the 1940s, Torino saw the birth of the tool maker Elli Zerboni (1912) and the chuck makers Pinto, Vagnone & Boeri, Gamfior, OMLAT and Autoblok^[1]. That specialist makers of holding tools and cutting tools grew up before the lathe itself is linked to the later pattern of small and medium-sized firms in the industrial districts.

⛩Links with Japan

Comparing with Japan in the same period

Italy and Japan both began to industrialize later than Britain, the US and Germany, and both built up domestic production while importing machine tools. In Japan, Shotaro Ikegai started the Ikegai works in Tokyo in May 1889 and the same year built a British-style lathe for his own use (Mechanical Engineering Heritage No. 53)^[23][24]. In that same year, 1889, only four private firms in Torino that also made machine tools had more than 50 workers. In 1906, the year a German Pfauter hobbing machine is said to have been first imported into Japan^[25], Dubosc of Torino was building spiral bevel gear cutters.

Trade shows differed too. The machine tool section of the 1911 Torino exhibition was almost all foreign companies, whereas Japan's first machine tool exhibition (October 1921, Osaka, 126 companies) was a place to show domestic machines^[24]. In the 1930s, while Italy had sanctions and its self-sufficiency policy (1935), Japan chose licensed domestic makers under the Machine Tool Manufacturing Industry Act (1938). And in 1940, when the US stopped exporting machine tools to Japan, more than 80% of Japan's imports came from the US^[24]. So the two countries depended on different suppliers, since Italy in 1938 bought mainly from Germany (see the timelines of Japanese Archive, Chapter 1, and Chapter 4).

What came next: Italian makers that became Japanese companies

PAMA of Rovereto, whose founding in 1926 we saw in this chapter, became a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan's Nidec in February 2023. Nidec says PAMA fills the gap in horizontal boring mills in its gear machine and large machine divisions^[12]. Postwar machine tool relations between Italy and Japan are covered under “Links with Japan” in Chapter 2.

FAQ

Whose machine tools did Italian factories use around the time of unification?

Mostly imported ones. At the state rifle factory in Terni, which an American investigator saw in 1909, only 10 of 1,400 machines were American; most were the roughly 900 machines delivered by Greenwood & Batley of Britain in the early 1880s, plus German machines. By contrast, the great majority of the 480 machines at Itala, a car company in Torino, were American. There was a division: British and German machines for weapons, American ones for cars.

Which was Italy's first machine tool maker?

No source lets us name a single “first,” but early examples are Michele Ansaldi, who built a machine tool factory in Torino in 1884; Roberto Züst, who had a machine tool works in Intra in 1893; and Dubosc, which made precision machinery in Torino from 1888 and built a spiral bevel gear cutter in 1906. Around 1907 an American investigator regarded these three plus Savant as the four makers of international standard.

Why did Olivetti build machine tools?

Because it needed to design its own special machines for mass-producing typewriters. In 1926 it set up a small workshop (later OMO) in its Ivrea plant, and it began selling to outside customers with the TS1 bench drill of 1936. After the war it grew into OCN, a company making NC machines and machining centers.

Before World War II, was Italy self-sufficient in machine tools?

No. Production in 1938 was 224 million lire, covering only about half of domestic demand; the rest was imported, mainly from Germany. The League of Nations sanctions of 1935 and the self-sufficiency policy increased the number of domestic makers, but for mass-production machines and gear cutters, foreign machines remained the model.