Camillo Olivetti

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Camillo Olivetti
Born
Samuel David Camillo Olivetti

(1868-08-13)August 13, 1868
Ivrea, Piedmont, Italy
DiedDecember 1943(1943-12-00) (aged 75)
Biella, Piedmont, Italy
Occupation(s)Engineer, company founder
ChildrenAdriano

Samuel David Camillo Olivetti

printers and other business machines.[2] The company was later run by his son Adriano
.

Biography

Samuel David Camillo Olivetti was born in 1868 in a bourgeois Jewish family in Ivrea, Piedmont.[3] His father, Salvador Benedetto, was a textile trader and his mother, Elvira Sacerdoti, that was from Modena, was bankers' daughter. From his father, Camillo Olivetti received the entrepreneurial style and the love for the progress, while from his mother the love for languages (Elvira spoke four languages). His cousin was the painter Raffaele Pontremoli. when Camillo was one year old, his father died. His mother looked after him, who was sent to the boarding school of «Calchi Taeggi» in Milan. At the end of high school, he enrolled at the Royal Italian Industrial Museum (later

electrotechnics courses held by Galileo Ferraris. He graduated on 31 December 1891 in industrial engineering, Camillo needed to improve his English and, on the other, to gain useful work experience. He stayed over a year in London where he worked in an industry that produced measuring instruments for electrical quantities, also doing the mechanic
. Upon his return to
Thomas A. Edison laboratories at Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, where they met the brilliant American inventor in person. After this meeting, in 1893, Camillo wrote to his brother-in-law Carlo from Chicago
:

August 13, 1893. […] Now that I've given you some impressions of the city, I'll tell you how I spent my time there. […] Mr. Hammer took us to Llewellin Park, a half hour train ride from New York to see Edison's laboratory. Mr. Edison himself came to receive us and had a little conversation with us and played some pieces of music on his phonograph. As you can see, I soon started making the acquaintance of famous people. Edison has a huge building there in Llewellin Park which, like most of the industrial and private buildings here, is made of wood. Beyond a beautiful library and a warehouse where he keeps a bit of everything, he has a huge laboratory with about seventy horsepower, machines, electric dynamos, lathes, machine tools, a complete physics and chemistry cabinet, a photographic cabinet and even a theater where he is making experiences, which seem to have not been very successful up to now, on the cinema. He is helped by a large number of assistants and whatever he can think of to build he can do it without difficulty. Edison is a handsome man, tall with a Napoleonic face. He is kind but being rather deaf, and on the other hand not being the prof. Ferraris capable for the moment neither of understanding nor of explaining himself much in English, the conversation was not very animated. […]

— Camillo Olivetti, American Letters, Adriano Olivetti Foundation, 1968-1999

Camillo continued the journey from

Palo Alto began to know better US universities. As an assistant electrotechnical at Stanford University (November 1893 - April 1894), Olivetti was able to experiment in the laboratory the potential and the different applications of the use of electricity. The United States will always represent for Olivetti the frontier of economic modernity, the model to refer to in the path of affirmation of its industrial project in Italy: the vivid memory of the collection of American letters, published after his death in Biella
in December 1943.

See also

References and notes

  1. ^ "OLIVETTI, Camillo in "Dizionario Biografico"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Archived from the original on 2019-12-23. Retrieved 2020-05-25.
  2. ^ Camillo Olivetti biography Archived 2009-02-11 at the Wayback Machine - olivetti.nu
  3. ^ "OLIVETTI, Camillo in "Dizionario Biografico"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Archived from the original on 23 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-05-25.

External links

Media related to Camillo Olivetti at Wikimedia Commons

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