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Abstract
Knowledge is increasingly considered a crucial resource for economic and business development. However, it is a broad concept that calls for further specifications: different kinds of knowledge call for diverse transfer and learning mechanisms, crucial for their application to economic activity. Focusing on the case of Giovanni Battista Pirelli (1848–1932) – Italian engineer and entrepreneur, founder (1872) of the first Italian rubber company, G.B. Pirelli & Co. – and his educational journey through Europe (1870–1871), this article investigates the complexity of the learning mechanism which in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed a relatively peripheral region like Northern Italy to reduce the gap separating it from the centre of European industrialization. Special attention is devoted to the characteristics of the rubber manufacturing industry and to the specific difficulties encountered in the acquisition and transfer of knowledge (including technology) related to a relatively new and rapidly evolving industry.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Franco Amatori, Kristine Bruland, Youssef Cassis, Andrea Colli, Terry Gourvish, Anna Guagnini and Matthias Kipping, in addition to the anonymous referees, for valuable comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
1 The document is at present deposited in the library of Monza's cathedral. I am deeply indebted to Donato Barbone, curator of the Private Archives of Alberto Pirelli, who brought the existence of the manuscript to my notice and who assisted me during the transcription and editing of the document. It has recently been published as Pirelli, Viaggio di istruzione all'estero (from now onwards referred to as Diario).
2 The spread of industrialization on the European Continent and its different outcomes in various countries is thoroughly and convincingly described, among others, in Pollard, Peaceful Conquest.
3 The literature on the Second Industrial Revolution is quite vast. Possibly one of the best accounts is that provided by Landes, The Unbound Prometheus. Alfred Chandler has investigated the Second Industrial Revolution using the firm as unit of analysis; see especially Chandler, Scale and Scope. For a recent critical review of the historiography concerning the Second Industrial Revolution see Hull, “From Rostow to Chandler to You: How Revolutionary Was the Second Industrial Revolution?”
4 Literature on technology transfer and industrial modernization is wide and well known. In addition to Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, see Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box; Von Tunzelmann, Technology and Industrial Progress. A recent, interesting, overview is offered by Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena.
5 See Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena, 2.
6 See Lundvall and Johnson, “The Learning Economy.” Interesting considerations on the use of these categories in a historical perspective are in Bruland, “Skills, Learning and the International Diffusion of Technology.”
7 There is a large body of literature dealing with the concepts of tacit and codified knowledge. In addition to the ‘classic’ work by Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, see, for example, Howells, Tacit Knowledge and Technology Transfer, and the stimulating debate published in Industrial and Corporate Change: Cowan and Foray, “The Explicit Economics of Knowledge Codification and Tacitness,” and Johnson, Lorenz, and Lundvall, “Why All This Fuss About Codified and Tacit Knowledge?”
8 Among the literature in English on Italy's economic and business history, see Cohen and Federico, The Development of the Italian Economy, and Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy.
9 Giovanni Battista was the eighth of ten brothers and sisters, of whom only five survived to maturity. The existing documents refer to his father, Santino, as a baker, while his mother, Rosa Riva, belonged to a family of house decorators. According to Giovanni Battista Pirelli's son Alberto (who later took over the direction of the family enterprise), the Pirellis were ‘not poor, but rather a family of modest means’; Pirelli, La Pirelli, 14.
10 The winner of the other bursary was Ettore Paladini (1848–1930), Pirelli's former classmate, a civil engineer interested in hydraulics.
11 For the complete regulation of the prize, see R. Istituto Tecnico Superiore di Milano, Effemeridi dell'Istituto Tecnico Superiore.
12 Pirelli's first visit to Great Britain was postponed only for a short time. In 1872 he travelled to England to purchase most of the machinery for his newly founded company. The decision to turn to British firms for the supply of machinery is a clear indicator of the leading role played by that country in the early development of the rubber industry.
13 The correspondence exchanged by Pirelli and Paladini during their journeys provides much evidence of their complaints over the inadequacy of their grant. Pirelli vividly expresses his decision to avoid visiting Great Britain precisely because of financial constraints: ‘Professor Colombo writes to me letters full of interesting advice, but he doesn't understand that the money isn't enough. He even got to the point of asking me to go to England! Well, they'd better find someone else for that!! You should see how deep the wounds in my wallet are’. G.B. Pirelli, letter to E. Paladini, 28 April 1871, Archivio Privato Alberto Pirelli in Milan (Private Archives of Alberto Pirelli, from now on referred to as APAP). The letters written by Colombo to Pirelli show that Colombo had tried quite hard to persuade him of the importance of visiting Great Britain. Colombo had also offered to provide his young pupil with letters of presentation addressed to some of the most important engineering companies of the period (such as Fairbairn's in Leeds and Worssam in London); see G. Colombo, letter to G.B. Pirelli, 19 April 1871, APAP. As a matter of fact, while Pirelli was travelling abroad Colombo was busy opening an engineering consultancy in Milan which was to also act as Italian agent for some of the most prominent European engineering firms of the time. For this reason, Colombo was trying to take advantage of Pirelli's journey abroad to establish contacts with companies potentially valuable for his purpose.
14 Pirelli was aware that his decision would mean skipping visits to important factories, and not only of the rubber industry: ‘My God! I will be barely able to make a short stop in Paris and then I will have to rush back home! How sorry I will be not to devote some time to visiting Lorraine and Alsace; especially the latter region, where I could dream again of water engines and huge cotton and wool factories’; Pirelli, Diary, 211.
15 Among Pirelli's Italian contacts, Teresa Berra Kramer provided the greatest number of letters (19), most of which were addressed to entrepreneurs active in a variety of sectors and which were almost all used by Pirelli. Giuseppe Colombo provided five letters, three of which were addressed to scientists or teachers of foreign polytechnic schools, showing that Colombo had more links with the scientific than the entrepreneurial and business communities of the countries Pirelli visited. The close ties between the German polytechnic schools and local industries are well demonstrated by the case of Carl Linde (among others), who provided Pirelli with 12 letters addressed to some of Germany's most important firms. Carl Linde (1842–1934) was at that time professor of industrial mechanics at the Polytechnic schools of Zurich and Munich, and cooperated for a long period with two of the most important German firms of the time – the mechanical engineering firm of A. Borsig in Berlin and the railway company Krauss in Munich – before his decision to found his own company (1878) for the production of refrigerating machines.
16 G.B. Pirelli, letter to E. Paladini, 9 May 1871, APAP. It is worth noting that Pirelli was rejected by only three firms that were not rubber manufacturers.
17 As far as the organization of workforce is considered, Pirelli was especially fascinated by the large companies that had adopted a division of labour. Most telling are his comments on the railroad engineering company Clett & Co. in Nuremberg (Germany): ‘with such a large production as the one obtained with 3,000 workers and with such a specialized yet simple kind of job, one well understand when a true division of labour is possible. And this is the case, and I think there is also a sub-division of labour. A worker always works at the very same desk, or at the same file, or at the same mallet or oven, and never at a different piece, but always at the very same one. And often enough, even when working at a same piece he only performs part of the job leaving to others, especially employed for this purpose, the performance of tasks he could well accomplish himself. It is natural that with such an organization one must produce a lot, at low prices, and of excellent quality’; Pirelli, Diary, 148.
18 This was the case with the visit to a paper mill in Chur: ‘Mr Burck, notwithstanding his fabulous kindness and his effort in providing explanations, being only the firm's director and absolutely not a technician, was not very useful’; Pirelli, Diary, 4. The visit to the mill was even more useless because the absence of water in the nearby canal had caused the interruption of the productive activity.
19 The bibliography on the Politecnico is extensive. General overviews of the school's history, its main features and its role in the industrialization of the country are offered by: Il Politecnico di Milano and Lori, Storia del R. Politecnico di Milano.
20 The slight interest shown in applied science in the Politecnico and its relationship to the industrial structure and performance of the country is well described in Fox and Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops and Sites.
21 For a detailed portrait of this very enterprising engineer see Lacaita, “Giuseppe Colombo e le origini dell'Italia industriale,” and Borruso, “Il giovane Colombo e la formazione dello sviluppo industriale milanese (1857–1881).”
22 For the definition of ‘useful’ knowledge, see Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena.
23 The surviving correspondence between Riva and Pirelli reveals that Riva actually managed to be admitted as an apprentice in two of the most important Swiss firms of the sector (Escher Wyss & Co. in Zurich and Caspar Honegger in Rüti). The correspondence also suggests that Riva attended some lectures at Zurich's polytechnic, although there is no surviving evidence of this fact in the school's archives (which are quite patchy for the period here considered).
24 G. Colombo, letter to G.B. Pirelli, 26 May 1871, APAP.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 See G.B. Pirelli and A. Albertini, Appunti biografici, MS, Archivio Storico Industrie Pirelli (ASIP) 1342.
28 Some 50 years later, Pirelli recalled this fact in the following terms: ‘the engineer Rougier had told us [Colombo's students] that, while in the area between Ancona and Falconara, charged by the State to solve the problem of rescuing the warship Affondatore, which had sunk in that spot, he realized that it was difficult to find the rubber pipes required in order to evacuate the water from the craft. A French manufacturer and seller of rubber goods by the name of Goulard had offered his products. Rougier added that in Italy the production of rubber tubes was completely unknown’; G.B. Pirelli and A. Albertini, Appunti biografici, MS, ASIP 1342. Rougier, a colleague of Colombo's, provided Pirelli with a letter of presentation to Goulard. This was a first step towards admittance into the French rubber industry.
29 The conquistadores had brought some rubber products back from the New World and explorers had written accounts illustrating the techniques employed by the populations of the Amazon River to collect sap from the rubber trees. On the history of the rubber industry see Porritt, The Early History of the Rubber Industry; Coates, The Commerce in Rubber; Schidrowitz and Dawson, eds., History of the Rubber Industry; Serier, Histoire du caoutchouc. For France see Dumond, thesis; for England and the United States see Woodruff, The British Rubber Industry, and “Growth of the Rubber Industry of Great Britain and the United States.”
30 Natural rubber was very sensitive to temperature variations. In warm weather it became soft and sticky, while in cold weather it hardened and broke easily. In addition, the turpentine commonly used in the mixture for waterproofing cloth had a very sharp and unpleasant smell, which was obviously a negative feature for clothing.
31 Vulcanization (discovered by the American Charles Goodyear, 1800–1860) consists in the process of heating a mixture of rubber and sulphur at high temperatures. While Goodyear patented his discovery in the United States, the industrialist Thomas Hancock managed to obtain the patent in Great Britain. The rivalry between Goodyear and Hancock ended up in the courts, but in the end there remained two patents for the same process.
32 For example, this is the case for mechanical items such as rubber belts and conveyors, tubes, valves, etc. Rubber was especially important for railways – an industry experiencing a rapid expansion – and was widely used for the production of buffers and springs.
33 For the production of isolated electric and telegraph cables gutta-percha was used more frequently than rubber; because of its physical characteristics, gutta-percha was preferred for the production of telegraph underwater cables.
34 The absence of rubber manufacturing in Italy prior to the foundation of G.B. Pirelli & Co. can also be explained by the difficulties encountered in the supply of the raw material. In this period in Europe natural rubber imported from Latin America was sold mainly on three markets: London, Liverpool and Antwerp. Italy had no share in the trans-oceanic commercial routes.
35 Pirelli, Diary, 246.
36 The entry “Rubber and Gutta-percha” published sometime later, in 1882, in the Enciclopedia delle arti e industrie (signed by Luigi Gabba but presumably written by Pirelli himself) explains this point very well: ‘The greatest obstacle to the development of this industry in Italy is the difficulty of finding prepared technical personnel … It is very difficult to find someone with some technical experience because the number of firms is still very limited, and they jealously guard their proceedings, and their technical directors are either owners themselves or closely linked to the owners by generous contracts’; Pareto and Sacheri, eds., Enciclopedia delle arti e industrie, 1177.
37 With regard to the typologies expressed above, such characteristics of the rubber industry made the acquisition of the ‘know who’ and ‘know how’ kinds of knowledge (the two informal categories) especially important for the success of Pirelli's entrepreneurial project.
38 Pirelli refers to the American Rubber & Co. in Mannheim; G.B. Pirelli, letter to E. Paladini, 28 April 1871 (APAP).
39 Pirelli, Diary, 145.
40 Ibid., 249–250.
41 Ibid., 165.
42 There is a wide literature on travels aimed at the acquisition of knowledge on foreign economic development as a means to fuel development in one's home country. Many historians have concentrated on the pre-industrial period or on the years of the first industrial revolution. For example, see Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer; Henderson, J.C. Fischer and His Diary of Industrial England; Bruland, “The Norwegian Mechanical Engineering Industry.” R.R. Angerstein's Travel Diary is the diary of a government official travelling in England and Scotland on behalf of the Swedish crown in order to acquire information on the metalworking industry. Another example of travel notes, written by a German locomotive manufacturer (Emil Kessler), is provided by Enzweiler, ed., Reisens fürs Industriezeitalter.
43 Pirelli, Diary, 107.
44 Pirelli's praise of the German system of technical education was clearly expressed during his visit to a railroad construction company in Esslingen (Württemberg): ‘I was surprised by the fact that every worker can do his job according to the instructions he deduced for himself from the technical drawings of the type that in our countries would be prepared for engineers. This is a result of their schools. In every village of a certain importance, everyone is compelled to study for seven years, starting from the age of seven. In the last years the teachings related to machine drawing and constructions are imparted. Then, until they are seventeen, they are compelled to attend special schools on Sundays: if they fail to do this they can be fired from the companies. How could you not obtain a good and low-cost working force with this system?’; ibid., 129.
45 G. Colombo, letter G.B. Pirelli, 26 May 1871, APAP.
46 The contract of employment expressly required Goulard to communicate to Pirelli all the information needed in order to make him autonomous in the technical direction of the company; see Deed of Convention with Goulard, 25 Feb. 1872, MS, ASIP 6. As for the creation of the company, the problem of finding the capital needed to finance the new business appeared much less problematic: Pirelli could rely on the support of Giuseppe Colombo and the group of entrepreneurs, industrialists and aristocrats who shared his urge to start a real modernization of the country's economy. At its foundation, the capital of G.B. Pirelli & Co. amounted to 215,000 lire, in shares of 5,000 lire each, subscribed by 25 partners. Among them were Giuseppe Colombo, Teresa Berra Kramer, and Francesco Brioschi (director of the Politecnico). See the act of foundation of the company deposited in ASIP 5.
47 The importance of exhibition catalogues as diffusion channels for this kind of knowledge is clear when one considers that Pirelli very often refers to the reports written by the Swiss committee during the 1867 Paris exhibition as a valuable source of additional information concerning the firms visited during his journey. The usefulness of technical journals and textbooks is confirmed by the long list of titles written by Pirelli in the last pages of his diary and meant as a reminder of readings he intended to complete upon his return home.
48 François Casassa had set up his rubber manufacturing firm in the 1850s and by the beginning of the following decade his firm was quite well known in France. Health problems had forced him to sell the company in 1873, but within a couple of years he was ready to get back in business and was planning to open a rubber manufacturing company in Italy.
49 See Deed of Convention with Goulard.
50 Pirelli, Diary, 264.
51 See G.B. Pirelli, Report on the State of the Company at the Beginning of 1875, MS, ASIP 43.
52 This does not mean that the company could do without the support of foreign technicians with some experience in the field. As mentioned above, in 1877 François Casassa entered the company and even as late as 1879–1880 beginning the production of insulated telegraph wires required the employment of the British Thomas Connolly; see ASIP 91.
53 A leadership Act was retained in the long term, since today Pirelli remains among the top 15 Italian companies in terms of turnover.
54 The clear choice made by Pirelli of developing the company primarily in the two most innovative among the sub-businesses of the rubber industry, devoting minor attention to the production of apparel goods emerges quite clearly from the balance sheets preserved in company archives and by the yearly reports made by Pirelli at company board meetings.
55 The share of exports on overall production showed an increasing trend ever since its beginnings (the first exports started three years after the foundation of the company) and in 1910 it was over 40 per cent. The Milanese company engaged quite soon also in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and in 1901 it opened the first production plant abroad (in Spain, near Barcelona) for the manufacturing of electric cables. On the internationalization of the company see Barbone, “L'internazionalizzazione come condizione di sopravvivenza.”
56 See Anelli et al., Pirelli 1914–1980.