100 Years of Olivetti Typewriters: A Socialists' Utopia

On May 1, May Day – International Workers’ Day – it is entirely appropriate that we should salute Camillo Olivetti for his pronounced, lifelong socialist leanings. Camillo was not just, as Richard Polt points out, a genius among typewriter manufacturers, he was also very much a man of his word, ever true to his social and political beliefs. The social welfare programs he introduced at Olivetti factories, which were to be adopted and enhanced by his progressivist son Adriano, when Adriano took over the company in 1938, are truly praiseworthy. Olivetti was not just an industrial relations trendsetter – more to the point, an example setter - in Italy, but internationally. Its initiatives ranged from factory conditions, with a reduced working week and above-average wages, to 9 1/2 months paid maternity leave (almost unheard of at the time), family welfare and child care, worker’s housing and recreation facilities. Olivetti factories were unquestionably, in the company’s first half-century, the embodiments of a socialist ideal of Utopia.

Camillo is described in Olivetti’s official history (Olivetti 1908-1958) as a man of “Jewish Old Testament piety and vision”, a man of “Messianic enthusiasm”. This was, apparently, “admirably complemented” and “prudently tempered” by his wife’s (Luisa’s) “rigorous Waldensian morality and her strict Gospel Christianity”. In later life, Carmillo converted to the Unitarian faith, one which teaches that reason, rational thought, science and philosophy co-exist with faith in God, and that humans have the ability to exercise free will in a responsible, constructive and ethical manner, with the assistance of religion. Whatever else Camillo’s Jewish upbringing might have taught him, a sense of fairness to all men was undoubtedly imbued deep within him.

When one reads Consumers Union magazine reports of the industrial conditions in American typewriter factories in the late 1930s, as scanned in an earlier post on this blog, the extent to which Olivetti stood out in terms of industrial relations becomes even more apparent. While the reports praise the conditions at the Hermes factory in Switzerland, they condemn strike-breaking practises and employer intransigence at the Remington factory in the US, and find Underwood merely satisfactory. Comparing, in particular, Camillo Olivetti with James H.Rand, president of Remington Rand, a man described by an industrial trial examiner as “exhibiting a callous, imperturbable disregard of the rights of its employees that is medieval in its assumption of power over the lives of men and shocking in its concept of the modern industrial worker,” is like putting a god beside the devil himself.

Such was Camillo’s close relationship with his workforce, he even took part in Ivrea May Day marches with them. Olivetti’s history records that Camillo’s “interest in every detail of production and sales was complemented by his personal relations with each of his employees. He knew the work and he knew the men, who respected him for his experience and skill. Camillo’s intimacy with his workmen was unusual for Italy, but the men found it only natural for him to join their celebrations on May Day.”

In his introduction to the Olivetti history, Adriano outlines his father’s socialist philosophy, as it applied to his relations with his workforce. But Adriano went to greater lengths to explain his own philosophy, one that embraced a concept of “community”, not just of the Olivetti company, but of other industries in Ivrea’s Canavese area. Read in the light of today’s fiercely competitive, cut-throat business world, Adriano’s vision of company cooperation and employee assistance across the region may seem wildly romantic and unrealistic. But clearly he was passionate about an idea which, he said, had taken 20 years to formulate in his head. “Long before it was theory,” says Adriano in the opening sentence of his “Notes Toward the History of a Factory”, “the Community was life.”

Romantic or not, a unique organisation called the Comunità did emerge under Adriano’s guidance and example, and spread not just across North Italy but throughout the country, acting as an effective counter to Communism. In the 1958 election for Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, the Communist Party vote dropped 3 per cent while the ISP vote rose 9 per cent and the fledgling Community Party won its one and only seat (Adriano Olivetti himself becoming the MP for Piedmont), having campaigned against particracy and Jacobin centralism, aiming to replace them with a federal union of local communities. The movement tried to merge both liberal and socialist ideas, opposing both conservatives and communists. It was all too short-lived, sadly, as Comunità died with Adriano in 1960. One claim has it, however, that “Statistics prove … that because of Olivetti’s organisation and its influence on the working class, Italy was spared from the tentacles of Communism.”

In his introduction to the Olivetti history, Adriano goes on the express his own personal disappointment at the failure of the Italian socialist revolution, which he says he witnessed during his years at a polytechnic institute between 1919-1924. “I can still picture the great parade of 200,000 people on May Day 1922, in Turin; but there was no one intellectually capable of channelling this great human impulse toward a better way of life. The question that remained in my mind was why the remarkable advances in business and technical organisation did not seem to have their political counterparts.”
The Partito Socialista Italiano (ISP) won 30 per cent of the vote in the 1919 Italian parliamentary elections. During the post-World War I crisis, the party called for revolution, but, according to S.I.Dorofeev’s entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979) “its leaders failed to give purposeful, practical guidance to the mounting mass movement and were unable to devise specific means of attaining the victory of socialist revolution in Italy. In 1921 the revolutionary wing of the ISP withdrew from the party, forming the Communist Party of Italy. Under attack by fascism, which took power in Italy in 1922, the ISP had essentially ceased its activities in the country by 1926.” Mussolini had been editor of a Socialist newspaper but in 1915 broke with the pacifism of the socialists and was expelled from the party. The rise of fascism should have been - and in some cases was - exceedingly bad news for the Olivettis.

It must be to the eternal credit of the Olivettis, indeed, that in terms of continuing to support socialism, they went their own way in the face of a rapidly changing Italian political environment; they went on putting their beliefs into practise with their own workforce, and they maintained their socialist philosophy during a period when it was neither politically expedient nor personally safe to do so.
Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea (2001), by Patrizia Bonifazio and Paolo Scrivano, says, “After an initial policy of not creating opposition to Fascism (perhaps also because of the Fascist party’s ambiguous position on social issues), Adriano Olivetti’s views hardened into evident dissent to the regime. Imprisoned in Rome in 1943 by the Badoglio government, in February 1944 Olivetti escaped to Switzerland, where he met many Italian intellectuals in exile. In May 1945, Adriano returned to Ivrea and a new phase of reorganisation and expansion in the company began.”

Camillo Olivetti had first set out his philosophy in a series of articles in Tempi Moderni and Azione Riformista “which preceded initiatives like the creation of the Burzio Fund in 1932 for health assistance, a complement of that guaranteed by Italian law at the time”.

The Olivetti history says, “When many factories were temporarily taken over by the workers, just after the First World War, the men at the Olivetti plant decided that their best interests were served by Camillo, and he remained in charge. What might be described as a kindly paternalism, seen from the viewpoint of today’s large impersonal industrial organisation, was then a personal relationship in which the workers’ esteem for Olivetti was based on his love for work performed as if it were an art. The economic results of the work interested him less, and indeed he was indifferent to money in itself … Certainly, his ideas of socialism did not stem from an economic view of society as from a moralistic vein. He was not a Marist, and did not think of society in terms of class conflict; he was a bourgeois and an industrialist, and as such it would not have occurred to him to condemn the capitalist system.”

Later, the history adds, “Camillo Olivetti never had any doubts concerning the worker’s right to share in the profits, and it was on this basis that he understood co-operation between the classes, a conciliation whose ethical premises he found, with a somewhat bitter shrewdness, in the spirit of Christianity.”

The history describes Olivetti employer-worker relations as so close that plans often took on the character of group decisions. “Honest workmanship and honest dealing were a moral principle with Camillo, and he defended this principle without regard to profit.”

The Olivetti history ends its chapter on Camillo with a moving tribute: “The day [in December 1943] he was buried it was raining; but from Ivrea, from the neighbouring towns, and from every point of the Canavese region, the workers got to the funeral. They came by any means they could, most of them on bicycles, regardless of fatigue and danger. The Nazis were slaughtering Partisans and threatening whole towns with reprisals. The little Jewish cemetery in Biella [where Camillo died] could have become the scene of a massacre. Yet it was filled that day with silent bare-headed men standing in the rain.”

What more need be said about a man who turned his ideals of socialism, of fairness and equality, into a working, practical reality, a man who turned a typewriter factory into a worker’s Utopia?

TOMORROW: Adriano the Aesthete: Typewriters As Things of Beauty

100 Years of Olivetti Typewriters: April 29, 1911-April 29, 2011

Given this is my 100th post, I decided to mark the occasion by devoting it, and the next few posts, to the Centenary of the Olivetti Typewriter.
It was on April 29, 1911, that the first Olivetti typewriter was seen by the public for the first time – at the Turin World’s Fair, the Esposizione Internazionale delle Industrie e del Lavoro. (I realise I’m coming in a few days late on this, but the research took a little longer than expected.)

Olivetti put two typewriters on display in the fair's Pavilion of the Newspaper. Elsewhere at the fair, Camillo Olivetti exhibited machine tools with which he had made the typewriters. “As an industrial technician,” the Olivetti official history (Olivetti 1908-1958) says, "[Camillo] was perhaps prouder of demonstrating the ingenuity and modernity of his methods than of showing the public his finished product.”

The fair’s official catalogue listed Olivetti as, “the first and only typewriter factory in Italy” and its product as “a typewriter of the first class, patented by C.Olivetti (Italy, France, Germany, England, Austria, Switzerland and the United States). Original design, legible characters, standard keyboard, two-coloured ribbon, decimal tabulator, back-space, multiple margin adjustment, modern workmanship, absolute precision.”

The 1911 Turin fair opened on April 29 in the Parco del Valentino and closed on November 19. Less than a month after the fair ended, Olivetti won a competition to supply the Italian Ministry for the Navy with 100 typewriters.

The typewriter company which was to ultimately outlast them all had taken its first step toward assured success. And high quality Olivettis remain very much in demand. Just tonight, a salmon pink Lettera 22 portable sold on Australian eBay for $122.50, while a red MP3 was listed for $199.

Just as the Chicago World’s Fair 18 years earlier (the Columbian Exposition opened on this day in 1893) had marked the birth of the Blickensderfer 5, so the Turin fair introduced to the world the ICO (Ingegneria Camillo Olivetti) M1 – Italy’s first-ever typewriter.

Camillo Olivetti’s little red-brick factory outside his home town of Ivrea, 30 miles from Turin, had opened on October 29, 1908, with initial capital of 350,000 lire (Camillo's share of 200,000 lire represented the value of the building).

Today, Ivrea, in the Canavese region of the Piedmont in north-west Italy, is a small city of 25,000 people. But Olivetti’s history describes it as being, in 1907, “like an overgrown village”. The Olivetti factory stood in the middle of empty field half a mile from the town. Camillo’s staff comprised “four inexperienced boys”, each of whom Camillo had to teach how to hold a filing tool. The first four employees were Valentino Prelle, Giuseppe Trompetto, Pietro Bronzini and Stefano Pretti. The factory installed Brown and Sharpe automatic lathes and milling machines, selected personally on a trip to the US by Camillo.

Camillo explained the two-year delay from opening his factory to producing the first typewriter for public consumption. “My preliminary studies,” he said, “took more than two years, and it was only in the spring of 1909, after some friends and I had formed the Ing. C.Olivetti company and I had made another trip to the United States to get an idea of how similar industries functioned there, that our plant really began to operate.”

During Camillo’s absence in the US, workers started making key and typebar linkages, to Camillo’s design. In an article by Berthold Kerschbaumer, translated by Richard Polt for Richard’s The Classic Typewriter site, Berthold describes the linkages thus, “Each typebar is … individually mounted and adjustable (the M1 had no type segment). The motion of the typebars is due to a solid linkage, which upon the striking of a key turns on its own axis and transfers this motion to the type by means of a lever.”

Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea(2001) describes the M1 as inspired by Underwood, but with “new attributes … a ‘faster’ machine thanks to a series of ideas that allowed rapid operation of the keys. For this to be achieved, the Olivetti engineers worked on the kinematic motion of the machine, but they also used more sophisticated materials in the moving parts, such as forged steel, which was more elastic and longer-lasting than cast iron.”

Olivetti’s history says Camillo “re-studied the technical problem of the typewriter, rejecting the idea of copying existing models. He wanted a new machine completely designed by himself in every detail.”
That the Olivetti M1 stood apart from its competitors, at least in the eyes of the Italian Ministry of the Navy, gave Camillo just the boost he needed – even if it was unexpected. “… we had the unhoped-for satisfaction of winning the competition … and from that moment began the truly marvellous progress of our industry.”

Within a year, Italy’s postal service put in another large order for Olivetti typewriters, for 50 machines. Camillo was able to open a branch in Milan in 1912, followed by others in Genoa, Rome and Naples. Camillo insisted on appointing his own sales representatives rather than employ concessionary agents. He was known to make personal contact with his customers and accompany his delivery boys.
By the time production got into full swing in 1912, the 500 square metre Olivetti factory had 20 workers, and output was 20 typewriters a week. By 1914, 100 workers were producing four machines a day. By 1920, 6000 M1s had been made. It was succeeded by the M20.

The main players in the Olivetti story I will be writing in coming posts are:

SAMUEL DAVID CAMILLO OLIVETTI: Founder and president. Born Ivrea, August 13, 1868, son of Salvador Benedict Olivetti (died 1869) and Elvira Priests Olivetti; died Biella, December 4, 1943, aged 75. (Camillo used his third name to honour his hero Camillo Cavour, one of the fathers of Italian unification.)

LUISA OLIVETTI (nee Revel): Wife of the founder. Born Ivrea, married Camillo Olivetti 1899, in Ivrea; mother of Adriano Olivetti. Other children: Dino, Elena, Laura, Massimo, Silvia (Marxer).

ADRIANO OLIVETTI: Eldest son of Camillo and Luisa, he succeeded Camillo as company president in 1938. Born Ivrea, April 11, 1901; died February 27, 1960, on a train trip from Milan to Lausanne.

TOMORROW: The Olivetti factory, a Socialist’s Utopia.

The Varityper Typewriter and The Irish in Australia

Took myself along to the National Museum of Australia at Acton in Canberra today to see an exhibition called “The True History of the Irish in Australia: Not Just Ned”. A colleague had told me I must go, if only to see a “wonderful little typewriter”. “I don’t know what it’s called,” he said, “but if you haven’t already got one, once you see it you’re going to have to have one.”

Turns out I’d seen this very same typewriter before, twice. It’s a Varityper. It once belonged to the great Australian novelist and short story writer Henry Handel Richardson (real name – and, yes, she’s a woman: Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson. Richardson used a male nom de plume in the same way another great Australian woman writer, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin – whose Corona 3 I own - wrote under the name Miles Franklin). Richardson's Varityper is pictured above, with the presentation of it in the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne below.

I’d first seen Richardson’s Varityper in the State Library of Victoria while I was there two years ago to see a very interesting exhibition called “Independent Type”. I was acquainted with the Richardson Varityper a second time when I gave my two typewriter presentations at the State Library in February.

The “Independent Type” exhibition included a few other “famous” typewriters, including the little Japanese-made Royal with which an Australian couple, English-born Tony Wheeler and his Northern Irish-born wife Maureen, started writing the Lonely Planet series of books(with Across Asia On the Cheap) on a kitchen table in Sydney in 1973 (Richard Polt, I believe, was once, briefly, a series contributor). There was also an Olivetti Lettera 32 which was used by the great Australian playwright David Williamson.

In light of what’s been written about “last typewriters” in the Typosphere in the past few days, some of the online comments about the “Independent Type” exhibition are interesting to look back on. One visitor asked, “Is it just me, or does seeing the actual typewriter used by Henry Handel Richardson feel a bit more romantic than seeing the laptop Peter Carey used?” To which “LiteraryMinded” replied, “The laptop is CHUNK. Typewriters will always be more romantic.” Another comment was: “Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter ... Treasure.” Carey’s laptop, by the way, was the one on which he wrote 20 drafts of The True History of the Kelly Gang (a novel from which the National Museum has stolen, Kelly-like, the title of its Irish exhibition).

Anyway, getting back to Richardson’s Varityper at the National Museum (where it’s on loan, of course, from the State Library of Victoria). What’s it doing in an Irish in Australia exhibition? Well, it turns out Richardson’s most famous novel, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, is based on the real-life experiences of her Irish-born father, though she was only nine when her father died. This three-part novel, the first part of which was published in 1917, includes Australia Felix, The Way Home (1925) and Ultima Thule (1929).

Ethel Richardson was born in Fitzroy, Melbourne, on January 3, 1870. Her father, Walter Lindesay Richardson, was a Dublin-born obstetrician and “Ethel laid great stress on her Irish origins and often said she was Australian by accident” (according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography). Walter was a friend of Alexander Brooke Smith, “who played a comic part in the demise of the Kelly Gang”. Soon after Ethel’s birth, Walter entered a private asylum and was then committed to the Yarra Bend asylum in Victoria, where he was diagnosed as suffering from general paralysis of the insane (incipient), eventually recognised as a late manifestation of syphilis - although this diagnosis is now in question, and it is believed Richardson suffered from dementia. But there is no doubt Ethel described “Richard Mahony” as suffering from what she believed to be GPI, and that she believed it to be a tertiary stage of syphilis.

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is regarded as Ethel’s masterpiece. But critics say it “has been too often taken to be a faithful account of the life of her father as a victim of personality defects, instead of a brain infection". Her husband, John George Robertson (who she married in Dublin), remarked that in drawing Richard Mahony's portrait, Ethel was really drawing her own.

Still, Ethel declared once that a writer usually had all of his or her material by the age of 10. The horrifying circumstances of Walter's illness and death and the permanent sense of insecurity inflicted on Ethel marked her personality and her work. Ethel died in Hastings, England, on March 20, 1946. Her writing desk (below) was two years ago acquired by the Chiltern Athenaeum Museum in Victoria.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography says Ethel’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony “is an archetypal novel of the country, written about the great upsurge of 19th-century Western capitalism fuelled by the gold discoveries. With relentless objectivity it surveys all the main issues which were to define the direction of white Australian society from the 1850s onwards, within the domestic framework of a marriage. Powerfully symbolic in a realistic mode, it is, as an English critic said in 1973, 'one of the great inexorable books of the world'.” It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others.

In case some are wondering about the title of the National Museum exhibition “Not Just Ned” (it most interestingly includes a full set of Kelly armour), and my references here to Ned Kelly (above), I should explain that Kelly and his gang were Australian bushrangers between 1878-80. Kelly is "Australia’s Robin Hood", a folk hero and a symbol of Irish-Australian resistance against oppression by the British ruling class for his defiance of colonial authorities. He has often been lionized (including by Carey) and at this time of a royal wedding, is being held especially close to many Australian hearts as a representation of the dream of an Australian republican. For the time being, however, we continue to embarrass ourselves by having a Union Jack in the top left corner of our red-white-and-blue so-called national flag. As Kelly said on the gallows, "Such is life". 

The Varityper typewriter, of course, is a later variation of the Hammond. Rather than go into any detail about it here, I refer readers to Richard Polt’s excellent page about the Varityper on his The Classic Typewriter page website, http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/varityper.html

The Varityper below is from Wim Van Rompuy's great site, typewriter.be, at
http://www.typewriter.be/varityper.htm

The Typosphere to a T: More Typewriter T-shirts

Nine T-shirts, two sweaters, one polo neck. That should keep me going for the next three weeks. Thanks to Rob Bowker for egging me on with his great artwork.

 (Also special thanks to Alan Seaver of Machines of Loving Grace, Ryan Adney and, of course, Ted. To anyone I've missed, my apologies)