Tradition and innovation

On his return to Italy in 1939, with a visa obtained laboriously by his wife, Efisio founded the company with a pioneering vision in machine tools sales. The groundwork and plans devised and set in place at the outset by Efisio kick-started the company’s growth. The companies represented were mainly French or Belgian firms that no longer exist in the machine tools industry, such as Ernault-Batignolles (copying lathes) sold for example to Rocco BORMIOLI to make the moulds for Coca-Cola bottles, Gambin (milling machines), GSP (radial drills) and SPM (high-speed lathes). Efisio served in the Second World War with the rank of major of the 3rd Army, as the leader of the Central and Northern Italy automobile fleet, in charge of requisitioning cars and vehicles that might be of use to the army. The apartment in Via Boccaccio in Milan was requisitioned by TELEMECCANICA and SILURIFICIO ITALIANO. Efisio’s wife, Maria, with their son Carlo Alberto only — their other son Gianni was at the front, in charge of a coastal battery in Dalmatia — was forced to leave for Azzate in the province of Varese, where she stayed at a friends’ villa: the Villa of the Castellani counts. And it was there, in hiding, that Carlo Alberto had as his private tutor the university professor Amintore Fanfani, who would go on to become Italy’s prime minister. Fanfani had also been evacuated with his wife to the same villa, where one of his daughters was born. With his private tutoring, Carlo Alberto was able not to miss years of classical high school and even managed to do two years in one, obtaining the classical high school diploma one year early. In 1944, the Republic of Salò, also known as the Italian Social Republic, introduced the death penalty for people in hiding or anyone hiding to ‘skip’ their mandatory military service. However, Carlo Alberto managed to get away with it: no one found him, even though it would seem that some people in the town knew. At the age of 23, he graduated from Politecnico di Milano with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

It was in fact this opening into the thriving world of spring manufacturers that led him to meet the gifted Otto BIHLER, followed immediately afterwards by the company AICHELIN for the heat treatment of springs and small parts. The fledgling company BIHLER took its first steps largely on the Italian market, where Italian imagination had a field day with these ingenious and innovative machines, to the extent that the name Bihler has become a byword for a type of technology for making stamped and formed parts. The Italian nuts and bolts industry, now one of the biggest in Europe and around the world, was approached by Carlo Alberto in a big way and with great success in the early 1950s. Visiting the large German nuts and bolts manufacturers, market leaders at the time, such as the famous BAUER & SCHAURTE in Neuss, he studied their heat treatment rooms, which were already equipped with AICHELIN furnaces, initially of the shaker hearth kind and then with conveyor for large production runs. Drawing on his connections with FIAT, he ‘knocked on the door’ of the FIAT nuts and bolts factory in Avigliana, which purchased the first plants. Immediately after, he also visited the fledgling FONTANA nuts and bolts manufacturer in Veduggio, marking the start of a long relationship that blossomed into a wonderful life-long friendship with a man almost his own age, Sir Loris Fontana. The latter had founded the company in 1952 with his brother, Senator Walter. Back then it was fitted out with small electric furnaces, as Sir Loris was fearful of gas. The first furnaces were in fact electric, then Carlo Alberto tried to convince Sir Loris to use gas. However, the real barrier to selling high-capacity furnaces, which ran on gas, to FONTANA, was the fact that there was no gas in Veduggio. But Carlo Alberto didn’t lose heart. He convinced his friend Enrico Mattei, the head of ENI, with his ‘SPECIAL INTERVENTIONS TEAM’, to disconnect the gas pipe from Renate railway station, one Saturday night, and pass it under the railway tracks to Veduggio, which sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel these days! But this gives us an insight into what Italy was like during the boom years.

Faced with the excessive red tape of modern times, Carlo Alberto would always recall this event, saying that in many cases we would need those special TEAMS that could work WITHOUT permits or authorisations. A technical partnership was established between Loris, Carlo Alberto and Heinz Berger (from the family that owned AICHELIN). This led to the supply of dozens of plants, as well as to the introduction of a whole host of innovations for hardening and tempering furnaces for bolts compared to the American competitor HOLCROFT (now part of the AICHELIN group). One such innovation, in the late 1960s, was the introduction of RADIAX burners, the first ever with built-in recovery system. Another, once again in Veduggio at the FONTANA factory, was the introduction of the first REKUMAT® recuperative burners in 1973. AICHELIN’s technical expert was the young — and later famous — Dr J.A. Wünning, who worked with AICHELIN until setting up his own company, WS, in 1982.Dr J.A. Wünning’s many patents and hundreds of publications included the only recently expired patent for FLAMLESS burners, which are a hot topic today due to their distinctive feature, i.e. their ability to slash NOx emissions. During his stay in Germany in the early 1980s, Efisio had the good fortune of having Dr J.A. Wünning as a ‘teacher’, not only for burner technologies, but also for techniques in protective atmospheres, in which Wünning was a real expert. Collaborations with other nuts and bolts manufacturers followed, starting with BRUGOLA — where the massive 3000 kg/h AICHELIN furnace was installed, still the biggest in Europe to this day — and later AGRATI, which were already customers at the time of the famous Mosquito and later as AGRATI-GARELLI. As well as with the BONTEMPI, VESCOVINI, USORINI, SACCHETTI, and STORCHI ‘families’, to name but a few. Needless to say, Carlo Alberto forged working relationships and friendships with all these nuts and bolts manufacturer ‘families’, and these relationships are still going strong today, even after the passing of the baton to Efisio.

Carlo Alberto passed away in 2022, aged 99. He had more than 70 years of work behind him, 38 of which with his son Efisio.

This began with the forerunner MARCEGAGLIA, belonging to Sir Steno, which was the first large collection of hydrogen furnaces in Italy. Next was ILVA, of the Riva family, with SirEmilio, who, fascinated by this ‘green’ technique, extended it to all his sites, followed by ARVEDI, of Sir Giovanni, with the bright annealing of stainless steel strips, again with a 100% hydrogen atmosphere, and finally the countless service centres. With BIHLER, Efisio oversaw the inception and development of the first integrated BZ machining centres, which would revolutionise the production method of a myriad electrical devices at ABB, SCHNEIDER, BTICINO, VIMAR and ROLD. With these machining centres, you could start with several strips, shearing, welding, tapping and assembling until you achieved the finished by-product, to be inserted last of all into its plastic casing: these devices are still produced with this technology to this day. Once again with BIHLER, he oversaw and implemented in Italy, in the automotive subcontracting chain, the industrialisation of several products for cars, from the new rocker arms made from sheet metal, replacing those in cast iron to reduce the consumption levels of endothermic engines, to ‘air pins’ for the production of electric engines for electric cars. Several hundred BIHLER machines in numerous Italian shearing facilities and spring manufacturers still testify to this technology’s success today.

In metallurgy, Efisio believed that the niche market of alloys and superalloys and special steels would have to grow due to the higher level of performance required of steels for the production of power generation turbines, or for wind energy or other applications with high-performance steels. He therefore succeeded in pushing and significantly increasing with ALD the spread of vacuum arc remelting (VAR) and electro-slag remelting (ESR) plants, as well as vacuum induction degassing and pouring (VIDP) furnaces in the industry’s biggest steelworks, to the extent that Italy was becoming an undeniable leader both in Europe and further afield.