Bartolomeo Cabella e il suo Tecnomasio: storia di un fallimento

To set up and develop the electromechanical sector was one of the biggest challenges facing industrializing countries in the last decades of the 19th century. As it is well known, Germany and United States won the competition. Among the many crucial factors, it must be underlined the key role played by a number of inventors-entrepreneurs such as Edison, Thompson or Siemens. As they have been successful men, their biographies have been thoroughly analysed. Their technical and management capabilities have been pointed out as well as the financial and institutional framework in which they moved. Less attention has been deserved to the many losers who entered the electrical industry in its early phase, when barriers were low and new firms could be easily established in order to produce innovative devices and machines. Bartolomeo Cabella was one of them. Taken a degree in engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan (1868), he found an employment at the Tecnomasio, an enterprise created in the aftermath of the Italian unification (1881) by scientists and militaries interested in manufacturing measurement gadgets to be utilized by mechanical, chemical and physical laboratories. In a few years, he became the technical director of the firm and began to project and construct electromechanical machinery. In a new type of dynamo he is told to come earlier than Gramme and the arc lamps he designed gave light to the famous international exhibit hold in Milan in the 1881. He acquired a partnership in the Tecnomasio in the 70’s and, in the 1898, he promoted the foundation of a public company, the Tecnomasio Italiano Bartolomeo Cabella. He was technical manager as well as executive chief. At first, the run of business was very good, but, in a couple of years, many financial and technical problems arose. Finally, Bartolomeo Cabella was forced to resign and the majority of the shareholders decided to draw up a joint venture with the Suiss Company Brown Boveri. Thus, the only Italian manufacture of electric machinery went off. Aim of the paper is to analyse this pioneering entrepreneurial experience attempting to explain why it failed. In particular, attention will turn on Cabella’s merits and fault, as well as on the policies accomplished by capitalists and stakeholders