E pensare che l’idea è vecchia tanto quanto la produzione industriale di elettricità, quando nel 12 gennaio 1882 veniva attivata a Londra, la “Holborn Viaduct”, la prima The idea is as old as the industrial production of electricity, when in London on January 12, 1882, the “Holborn Viaduct”, the first thermoelectric power plant in the world, was activated by the Edison Company. A year later (June 28th 1883), thanks to the initiative of professor Giuseppe Colombo and Giovanni Battista Pirelli, his pupil and young promise of industrial engineering, the event was replicated in Milan, a step away from the Duomo, in Via Santa Redegonda…
On September 4, 1882, Thomas Alva Edison inaugurated the second plant in New York, fixing on the entrance gate, a plate with the name of his company: Edison Electric Illuminating Company. His admiration for the great American entrepreneur, made Colombo picking up that surname to found his own company, a name that still persists today. Those first power plants however generated little electricity, just to light up London’s embankment with rudimentary lamps, the Broadway in New York and the arcades of Piazza Duomo in Milan. Or, just enough to recharge the lead batteries of the day, which were heavy and cumbersome but indispensable, especially in the army and navy. Less than five years after the plants opened, on 8 September 1888, the Spaniard Isaac Peral set the first ever proper submarine in the sea. Unfortunately the Spanish navy turned his project down, declaring it useless.