Adriano Olivetti

Italian engineer, politician and industrialist whose entrepreneurial activity thrived on the idea that profit should be reinvested for the benefits of the whole society. He was son of the founder of the Olivetti company, Camillo Olivetti, and Luisa Revel, the daughter of a prominent Waldensian pastor and scholar. Adriano Olivetti was known worldwide during his lifetime as the Italian manufacturer of Olivetti typewriters, calculators, and computers.

Olivetti was an entrepreneur and innovator who transformed shop-like operations into a modern factory. In and out of the factory, he both practised and preached the utopian system of "the community movement," but he never managed to build a mass following. In his company, apart from managers and technicians, he enrolled a large number of artists like writers and architects, following his deep interest in design and urban and building planning that were closely linked with his personal utopian vision.

The Olivetti empire had been begun by his father, Camillo. Initially, the "factory", consisting of 30 workers, concentrated on electric measurement devices. By 1908, 25 years after Remington in the United States, Olivetti started to produce typewriters.

On 27 February 1960, Adriano Olivetti took a train from Arona in the north of Italy towards Lausanne, Switzerland. A few kilometres after the border between the two countries, he had a neuronal bleeding that left him dead. He was 58.