It was 1872 when a young twenty-three-year-old engineer, Giovanni Battista Pirelli, returned to his homeland from a \u201cgrand tour\u201d through Switzerland, France, Germany and Belgium, with the aim of introducing \u201ca new or not yet widespread industry in Italy\u201d, which was that of rubber and its production. In 1873 Pirelli products started coming off the line in the first factory in Milan, which was by the Sevesetto river. Forty workers and five office staff were employed at the factory. A few years later, the rubber articles for industrial machinery, ships and railways were joined by consumer goods such as toys, clothing and haberdashery items. Within the space of ten years, in 1883, Pirelli had brilliantly overcome the inevitable difficulties of a pioneering activity and now had more than 300 workers and constantly expanding areas of production. The company broke into the British monopoly of the cables sector thanks to the research carried out by the greatest electrical engineers of the day (Emanuele Jona, and Leopoldo and Luigi Emanueli), and also secured a contract to supply power cables for the Niagara Falls and for the Nile, and it opened factories in Spain, England, Belgium, France and Argentina.<\/p>\n
From this time on, the company expanded exponentially, including overseas. It was in 1902, just thirty years after the first factory opened in Milan, that a plant was opened in Villanueva y Geltr\u00f9 in Spain, making Pirelli one of the very first Italian multinational companies. In 1913, Pirelli arrived in England, in Southampton, and in 1917 in Argentina. By 1922, fifty years after it was founded, the company had countless commercial offices on three continents and two rubber tree plantations in Indonesia.<\/p>\n