The Caprotti family, innovation and tradition in an Italian manufacture: Albiate and Switzerland

In the second half of the 19th century, Giuseppe and Carlo Caprotti took the company to truly competitive levels thanks to a massive mechanisation and modernisation project that allowed Caprotti to expand its business, after the Unification of Italy, on markets throughout the peninsula and even abroad.

ALBIATESE INDUSTRY, SWISS INDUSTRY

Caprotti

Honegger/Rüti

Sulzer

1840: Bernardo Caprotti founded “Bernardo Caprotti di Giuseppe” in Ponte Albiate for cotton weaving.

1842: Caspar Honegger founded a factory in Siebnen for the production of mechanical looms, where the Honegger loom was developed and produced.

1834: Johann Jacob Sulzer founded the “Fratelli Sulzer Foundry” in Winterthur, specializing in the production of industrial machinery.

1840 - circa 1867: The Caprotti company was still based on a nearly pre-industrial production system: few and simple machines, many warehouses, and worker-peasants who mainly wove from home. By 1866, there were about 1,500 of them.

1847: The Honegger factory moved to Rüti and expanded rapidly.

1839: The foundry expanded, and the first steam engine installed in Winterthur caused a great sensation.

circa 1867: Bernardo’s sons, Giuseppe and Carlo, began a widespread mechanization project for the company. The industrialist G. Fumagalli from Monza advised them to turn to the Swiss firm of Caspar Honegger.

1853: Railway connection established between the first foundry and the mechanical workshops in Rüti.

1860 - 1867: Sulzer opened its first foreign office in Turin; by 1867, the company already had more than 1,000 employees.

1868 - 1869: Carlo Caprotti stayed for long periods in Switzerland with Caspar Honegger.

1861: Honegger had become the leading manufacturer of textile machinery in Switzerland and one of the largest in the world.

1869: Thanks to the mediation of Caspar Honegger, Sulzer supplied Caprotti with a boiler and an engine; like Honegger, they made great efforts to teach them how to use them and, above all, assisted them in the delicate assembly operations.

1872: Carlo separated from Giuseppe and established the “Caprotti & Güttinger Company” for the mechanical manufacture of textiles.

1877: Construction of a rack railway connecting the plant to the railway station, located 12 meters higher.

1870: To ensure an adequate supply of skilled young craftsmen, Sulzer opened its first in-house training school in Switzerland, including an apprenticeship workshop.

1906: Bernardo Caprotti, son of Giuseppe, competed with his brother Emilio—and even with himself—through the “Manifattura di Val Camonica,” a highly modern cotton mill in the Bergamo area founded with other partners.

1886: After the founder’s death, the company was transformed into “Maschinenfabrik Rüti Ltd.”, becoming one of the world’s leading companies in textile machinery production. By 1890, the first foreign branches were established, reaching as far as the East.

1881: Sulzer opened a branch in Ludwigshafen, Germany, which quickly became successful. This led to the opening of sales agencies in Milan (which would also become a partner of Caprotti), Paris, Cairo, London, Moscow, Bucharest, and in 1914, Kobe in Japan.

1907: Bernardo and Emilio decided to transform “Bernardo Caprotti di Giuseppe” into “Cotonificio Caprotti Ltd.”, which was forced to close as early as 1915.

1898: “Maschinenfabrik Rüti” developed another highly successful innovation: automatic looms. In the same year, thanks to collaboration with the German engineer Rudolf Diesel, the company produced the first Sulzer diesel engine.

1909: Sulzer began building compressors.

1912: Separation of the partners. Emilio went bankrupt, and Bernardo obtained what would become “Manifattura Caprotti.”

1914: “Maschinenfabrik Rüti” expanded into international markets, reaching Moscow, Damascus, and Constantinople.

1914: The family-run company transformed into a large entity made up of three companies, each functioning as a holding.

1947: Thanks to the Marshall Plan, my grandfather Giuseppe “Peppino” Caprotti turned the Manifattura into a cutting-edge company.

1969: Georg Fischer acquired the factory, which since 1966 had been producing shuttleless air-jet weaving machines that by 1982 would capture a quarter of the global market.

1945 onwards: After World War II, a new phase of growth and strong expansion began. Production facilities tripled, and the product range expanded, especially in the fields of boiler construction and textile machinery.

1999: Bernardo Caprotti, my father, sold the Manifattura to the Albini family.

1982: Sulzer acquired “Maschinenfabrik Rüti” from Georg Fischer.

2009: Sulzer celebrated 175 years of continuous expansion.

2009: The Manifattura closed permanently.

2008: The company ceased to exist permanently.

2024: Sulzer is a global leader in fluid engineering and chemical processing applications.

There are numerous documents on the period that saw Caprotti’s transformation into a centralised mechanical processing company, which took place amidst a thousand difficulties due above all to the inexperience of the personnel employed, the lack of technical knowledge and the environment that was still profoundly agricultural and therefore substantially refractory to innovation. In the early days, gross errors and inexperience caused serious damage and considerable delays, and the Caprottis would probably have failed in their attempt if that curious effect of the industrialisation process that pushes the most advanced countries to export technology to backward areas of the world had not also occurred for them. In the Caprotti’s case, the ‘mentor’ is above all the Swiss company Caspar Honegger. It was Caspar Honegger who prepared the plant project for everything concerning the starting point of the production cycle (from the number and quality of the looms to the design of the dyeing plant), and it was Caspar Honegger who negotiated for Caprotti the purchase of a boiler and a tractor from the Sulzer brothers in Winterthur, and he also assisted them in what was one of their greatest difficulties, the assembly of the machinery, by sending assembly workers and foremen. Not least, it was Honegger who welcomed Carlo Caprotti from February to May 1869 on a real educational trip, during which he followed the company’s mechanisation project and learnt about machine technology and the management system of a modern industry.

While Carlo is in Switzerland, the situation in Ponte Albiate is even humorous: mysterious poorly assembled machines that do not work, surrounded by onlookers and the usual ‘experts’ who do not let the foreign technician on duty work, workers who wander around the halls without knowing exactly what to do, technicians who try to make a very modern coke boiler work with wood sawdust. Production drops tremendously because no one is used to the new work rhythms, and the employees fill out the books according to brain-dead criteria, since the new production processes require very complex accounting of which they know nothing.

In reality, beyond the comic implications inevitably associated with all that is clumsy and awkward, what was taking place in the small company on the banks of the Lambro was a piece of the industrial revolution, with all the traumas, contradictions and difficulties that this could present.

Of course, it is not that, having finally completed the ‘mechanical’ factory – which would always be implemented with new and more modern machinery, despite the constant quarrels between brothers – the difficulties were over. An example of this is the lighting system, as you can well understand, which is very important in a manufacturing business. As early as 1876, the Caprottis opted for a modern gas-fired system (produced from petroleum) to light the factories, powering 250 flames, entrusting its design and execution to engineer A. Redaelli of Milan: the failure is resounding. On a single day, 16 November 1878, Caprotti’s administrator, Mauro Rho, wrote Redaelli two letters. In the morning he complains that the machine won‘t start, and the worker blames this on not having the mass or whatever./ Today, however, I haven’t seen them in the factory for most of the day and I believe they are at the hotel having gas./ Sorry if I have to repeat myself, I’m beginning to get annoyed. In the afternoon, Rho continues, between the furious and the ironic: I continue mine today./The lighting in the factory this evening is pitiful; with primitive oil lamps it would be richer./The rooms stink, your workers are drunk./I am tired and annoyed; tomorrow go here to fetch your workers and the day after tomorrow I will start lighting with lucilina [oil, processed and lightened for use in the lamps]. The affair, always with comic and grotesque overtones, dragged on until 1880, when the Caprottis decided to finally drive Redaelli out, dragging him, moreover, uselessly, into court to try to obtain compensation for the damage suffered.

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Sources and reference Bibliography:
Albiate, Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Manifattura Caprotti Archives
R. ROMANO, I Caprotti; l’avventura economica e umana di una dinastia industriale della Brianza, Milano, 20082 (especially pp. 86-109)
Sulzer, Sustainably successful since 1834(https://www.sulzer.com/en/about-us/our-company/history ).
M. LEONHARD: ‘Maschinenfabrik Rüti’, in: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Version vom 29.10.2009. Online: https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041807/2009-10-29/, konsultiert am 08.10.2024.
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2023