History

Camillo Olivetti founded the Olivetti typewriter factory in Ivrea in 1908 in a converted shed — the first Italian typewriter manufacturer. His son Adriano Olivetti, who took over the company in 1938, transformed it into one of the most extraordinary experiments in corporate culture the twentieth century produced. Adriano believed that the factory was a social institution with obligations to the workers and the city: he built workers' housing to the designs of Italy's best architects, established the Olivetti Cultural Centres across Italy (canteen-cum-community-hall hybrids designed by the same architects who built the factories), and recruited a design team — Marcello Nizzoli, Ettore Sottsass, Mario Bellini — whose output defined Italian industrial design for two generations.

The products match the ambition. The Lettera 22 portable typewriter (1950, Nizzoli) won the Compasso d'Oro in 1954 and was selected by Illinois Institute of Technology as one of the hundred best products of industrial design in 1959. The Elea 9003 (1959, Sottsass), the first transistorised mainframe computer built in Italy, was the product that established the aesthetic vocabulary for electronic machinery: cool, precise, coloured in industrial pastels rather than the institutional grey that IBM and Burroughs used. The Valentine portable typewriter (1969, Sottsass and Perry King), with its red plastic casing and foam handle, was designed to be used anywhere — a portable office tool for the generation that was reinventing how people worked.

Adriano Olivetti died suddenly in 1960 on a train between Milan and Lausanne. The company continued to innovate — the Programma 101 of 1965, marketed by Olivetti, is often cited as the world's first commercially available personal computer — but the cultural programme lost its integrating vision. Olivetti's personal computing division was sold to Canon in 1990; the company itself was acquired by Telecom Italia in 1999.