Samuel David Camillo Olivetti[ Camillo Olivetti biography - olivetti.nu] The company was later run by his son Adriano Olivetti.
Biography
Samuel David Camillo Olivetti was born in 1868 in a bourgeois
Italian Jews family in
Ivrea,
Piedmont.
His father, Salvador Benedetto, was a textile trader and his mother, Elvira Sacerdoti, who was from
Modena, was a banker's daughter. From his father, Camillo Olivetti received the entrepreneurial style and a love for progress, while from his mother a love for languages (Elvira spoke four languages). His cousin was the painter Raffaele Pontremoli. When Camillo was twelve months old, his father died. His mother looked after him, and he was sent to the «Calchi Taeggi» boarding school in
Milan.
After secondary school he enrolled at the Royal Italian Industrial Museum (later Politecnico di Torino from 1906) and at the Technical Application School, where he attended
electrotechnics courses led by
Galileo Ferraris. Having graduated on 31 December 1891 in industrial engineering, Olivetti needed to improve his English and gain useful work experience. He stayed over a year in
London where he worked for a company that produced measuring instruments for electrical quantities, while also being a
mechanic.
Upon his return to
Turin, he became Ferraris's assistant. In 1893 he accompanied his teacher to the United States of America, who had been invited to lecture at the International Congress of Electrotechnics in
Chicago. Olivetti acted as his interpreter. Together they visited the 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:
Camillo continued the journey from Chicago to San Francisco alone, carefully writing down the things he was discovering about the United States of America. His correspondence from the United States was published in 1968 with the title of American Letters : if the British industrial situation had already struck him, he found the American reality far superior, not only from an industrial point of view but also from a social point of view. After a few months in Palo Alto he began to know US universities better. As an assistant electrotechnical engineer at Stanford University (November 1893 - April 1894), Olivetti was able to experiment in the laboratory the different potential applications of the use of electricity. From that point the United States always represented for Olivetti the frontier of economic modernity, the model to refer to in Italy's own industrial progress: the vivid memory of the collection of American letters, published after his death in Biella in December 1943.
See also
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