83 «The anomaly was too strong. The president of Confindustria at the time, Angelo Costa, could not bear Adriano publicly accusing entrepreneurs of pursuing "the fallacious and limited logic of maximum profit". Maybe he didn't like a man who got up at four in the morning, met you in his study at six and, when asked what he did every day between four and six, answered "I am projecting"» Furio Colombo - in Paolo Bricco, I ragazzi di Olivetti, Il Sole 24 Ore, 02/21/2010 “classification: subversive” Olivetti Adriano, son of Camillo. Classification: subversive. That was written on the cover of the dossier that the Aosta Public Security, in 1931, opened on the thirty-year-old Adriano Olivetti, son of Camillo, in order to deliberate on the belonging to the Aryan race certification, questioned due to his Jewish father’s origins. Subversive. Unwillingly, the Valle d'Aosta Blackshirt commissioner has been able to give the best and most trenchant definition of Adriano Olivetti. But not for our own reasons. He, the dark commissioner, was referring to the active role that Adriano Olivetti played in facilitating Filippo Turati's escape from the fascist regime, in 1926, together with Sandro Pertini, Carlo Rosselli and Ferruccio Parri, and in favoring for Gino Levi, his brother-in-law, the change of his surname in Martinoli, to save him from extermination in the odious name of an alleged race. We refer, on the contrary, to a man who joined his father's company – the Eng. C. Olivetti & Co. First national typewriter factory – in 1926 as a simple worker, after a degree in Chemical Engineering and two years of research in the United States to learn about the Fordist system; a man who became its director in 1932 and its president in 1938, expanding its boundaries far beyond the horizon of the red brick factory built by his father, to transform them into a method and a vision celebrated on a world scale. Into a subversive method. Olivetti was born from love. It was born in 1908, from a thousand affectionate kisses addressed by Camillo to his wife: these were the first words typed thanks to the prototype of the M1, the first Italian typewriter. Graduated in Industrial Engineering in Turin, active socialist when a Socialist Party did not yet exist, returning from America and Palo Alto, with a share capital of three hundred and fifty thousand lire, two partners and thirty workers, he built a red brick factory and, at the end of the 1800s, he began by constructing ammeters, wattometers, galvanometers, until he delivered to the Patent Office, in 1902, that object seen in the United States that did not yet exist in Italy. When, in 1911 and after meticulous years of refinements, he presented the M1 at the Universal Exposition in Turin, Camillo sold the first hundred to the Navy and the Ministry of Posts. All for the best, until the Great War fell. Camillo converted production into aircraft components, in aid of the state, using this break to redesign the M1. After the war, in 1919, the M20 came out, lighter and with a fixed landing gear, unlike the American competitors. The Olivetti typewriters became the most competitive in the world. When, in 1926, Adriano entered the factory, Olivetti was selling eight thousand machines a year, and he was but one of the five hundred workers on the assembly line. Three years of work at the forefront, and on his own skin, allowed him to submit to his father a project for the reorganization and rationalization of production, that led to surprising results, in terms of economic savings for the company and improvement of the working conditions for the labourers. Therefore, Camillo inaugurated for Adriano, and for his brother-in-law Gino Levi, the Studies and Projects Office, which will produce jewels of technology such as the M40 (1930), sold in more than half a million units, and the MP1 (1932), the first portable typewriter available in seven different colors – to be placed on home desks, and not just on office ones. To imagine and write, and not just to report. Those were the years of the rise of fascism. Those were the years of Adriano's uncertain consent to the regime, led by the meeting with the architects who will sign the expansion of the Olivetti factory, Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, Italian correspondents of Le Corbusier and the most advanced point of that rationalism in architecture also sustained by Mussolini. A brief parenthesis as a member of the National Fascist Party for Adriano – to protect his company and to personally submit to Mussolini an urban project studied with Figini and Pollini for the province of Aosta, to which Ivrea belonged – won’t be enough. Again, once more, war. But this time with the aggravating circumstance of the wrong race, which branded the Olivetti factory. The dispersion of his family, persecuted by the entry into force of the racial laws. The death of his father, alone, in 1943. In between, two months in Regina Coeli jail for Adriano because disliked by the regime, and two years in exile in Switzerland, where he will complete the
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