The internal combustion engine, the light bulb and penicillin are all inventions that were "Made in Italy", yet very few people are aware of this. Italy is a country of creators and visionaries, but the men behind the primates of science and technology have long remained unknown. Nevertheless, their insights have changed our lives. You will see a glimpse of this in the following article, in which we collected 10 Italian inventions – not the most important, nor even the most curious – which have been wrongly attributed to British and American inventors simply because they later obtained the patents.
Who really invented the revolver? Or the typewriter? Here are 10 inventions "Made in Italy" whose Italian roots are often ignored.
1. The Revolver
The revolver, whose authorship is often attributed to the American Samuel Colt, is actually an Italian invention. Three years earlier, in 1833, it was the Sardinian Francesco Antonio Broccu (1797-1882) who invented the first revolver. But he did not patent it.
2. The Telephone
Antonio Meucci (1808-1889) struggled all his life to be recognized as the inventor of the telephone against the Scot Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). The patent war ended only in 2002, when the U.S. Congress finally proclaimed the Italian Meucci as the rightful inventor of the telephone.
3. The Dynamo
The design for the dynamo was made by the Pisan Antonio Pacinotti (1841-1912). At age 18, he designed his "machine" which was used to transform mechanical work into electrical currents, but he neglected to patent it and published the article that described it only in 1865. What was the result? His design was stolen and the first dynamo produced on an industrial scale was carried out by the Frenchman Zénobe Gramme.
4. The Typewriter
We owe the typewriter to the lawyer Giuseppe Ravizza (1811-1855), who was among the first to create a keyboard for writing. He called it the Cembalo Scrivano (Writing Harpsichord), due to the similarity of its keys to those of the harpsichord. It consisted of more than 800 components – made by hand – of wood, iron and brass.
5. The Fax Machine (Pantelegraph)
The ancestor of the modern fax machine was the pantelegraph. It was invented by Don Giovanni Caselli (1815-1891), abbot and scientist from Siena who transmitted its first document via cable in 1856. He traveled around the world promoting his invention, but it received little attention.
6. The Piano
The musical world owes the piano to the Paduan Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1732). It was originally called the pianoforte in Italian. A piano built by Cristofori which belonged to the composer Benedetto Marcello is now kept in the National Museum of Musical Instruments in Rome.
7. Cheat Sheets
To Ernesto Bignami (1903-1958) we owe the famous "cheat sheets" that have helped many students in school. The Milanese Professor of Letters published the first cheat sheet in 1931 with his publisher.
8. The Allen Key (Brugola Key)
Egidio Brugola (1901-1958), born in Lissone, patented the Allen key (known in Italian as the Brugola key) in 1945, revolutionizing the process of assembly. The key existed since the early 1900's, but it was Brugola who turned it into a productive business.
9. The Thermometer (Thermoscope)
The ancestor of the thermometer functioned by air and was called a thermoscope. It was devised in 1612 by the Venetian Santorio Santorio (1561-1663) who first used it in the medical field.
10. Plastic
The Father of Plastic is Giulio Natta (1903-1979), the only Italian to have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963. Together with the German chemist Karl Ziegle, he was the discoverer of isotactic polypropylene which later became famous under the name of Moplen.
