From Cristofori’s piano to Olivetti’s Program 101, the
Italian inventions that transformed the present
There are inventions that do not belong only to the age in which they are born. They overcome the
laboratory, the workshop or workshop from which they take shape and come to modify gestures
newspapers, production systems, communications and mobility. Italy contributed to this
process by transforming technical insights into innovations of international scope.Italian
Traditions offers a journey through some ideas born in Italy that have left a mark on the
history.
The piano was born at the beginning of the eighteenth century from the work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, harpsichord maker
Paduan active at the Medici court of Florence. His invention exceeded the main limit
of the harpsichord: the impossibility of truly modulating the volume with finger pressure.
Thus was born the “piano and forte harpsichord”, ancestor of the modern instrument, in which
intensity varied according to touch. The novelty opened up expressive possibilities until then
unknown: without the piano, some of the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and
Liszt would have had another form, because it was precisely on dynamic variation that a
new musical writing.
With Alessandro Volta’s battery, in 1800, electricity entered a new phase. Alternating
metal discs and materials soaked in salt water or acidulated solution, Volta demonstrated that
the current could be generated in a stable and controllable way. The pile transformed
electricity from a phenomenon to be observed to available energy, opening a path that comes
up to modern batteries, today power plants for telephones, computers, electric cars and systems
of accumulation.
The internal combustion engine instead links the names of Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci to a joint
of industrial modernity. Before the automobile became a mass product, the two
scholars worked on the principle that transforms the explosion of a gaseous mixture into force
mechanics. Barsanti, Piarist priest and physics teacher, and Matteucci, engineer
from Lucca, in 1853 they built a first prototype of an internal combustion engine, based
on the explosion of flammable gases. To protect their priority, they filed a brief
at the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence, in an Italy where there was not yet a patent office
national. Their work remains an important stage in the development of a technology that has
engraved on transport, mechanized agriculture, navigation and industrial production.
Wireless telegraphy brings Italy’s contribution to the field of remote communications.
In 1895, at Villa Griffone, near Bologna, Guglielmo Marconi experimented with a system
capable of transmitting signals without the support of cables. That search transformed the waves
electromagnetic in an instrument applicable on a large scale and in 1909 earned him the Nobel Prize for
physics, shared with Ferdinand Braun. The impact went beyond the transmission of messages:
from naval communications to emergency systems, up to broadcasting and subsequent
wireless technologies, Marconi’s experiments redesigned the field of
telecommunications.
In the twentieth century, Italian innovation also came from industrial chemistry. Giulio Natta,
professor at the Polytechnic of Milan, he worked on polymers until, in 1954, he obtained polypropylene
isotactic, material destined to enter numerous production areas. The discovery, surrender
possible from studies on stereospecific catalysts, led Natta to receive the Nobel Prize in 1963
for Chemistry together with Karl Ziegler. The new material changed the plastics industry:
packaging, industrial components, household objects, fibres and sanitary devices could
count on a lightweight, resistant solution that can be adapted to very different uses.
The Olivetti Programma 101 brought electronic computing to the desk when computing was
still tied to large, expensive machines reserved for specialized technicians. It was presented by
Olivetti in New York in 1965 and was born from the work of a group of designers and engineers
led by Pier Giorgio Perotto. Compact and programmable, it was designed for a relationship
direct between user and machine: it allowed calculations to be performed and stored without going from
large processing centers and anticipated some principles of the personal computer. Also used
from NASA in the Apollo program, remains one of the most advanced examples of Italian capability
to combine engineering, design and concrete use of technology.
These inventions tell the story of an Italy different from that associated only with heritage
artistic or to manufacturing tradition. They show a country that, at very historical moments
distant from each other, he was able to intervene on concrete issues such as sound, energy,
movement, communications, materials and calculation. From those insights were born
tools and technologies that have not simply accompanied modernity, but
they helped build it.