Pio Pion (4 July 1887 – 15 May 1965) was an Italian

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

, known for founding the first Italian company producing movie projectors, the Fumagalli, Pion & C.

Early life

Pion vas born in

Varese Varese ( , , or ; lmo, label=Varesino, Varés ; la, Baretium; archaic german: Väris) is a city and ''comune'' in north-western Lombardy, northern Italy, north-west of Milan. The population of Varese in 2018 has reached 80,559. It is the c ...

in 1887 to his father Pierre, whose premature death forced the young Pio to move abroad in search for work. He returned to his native Italy in the first years of the 1900s, where he heard of the recent invention of the first

movie projector A movie projector is an opto- mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras. Mo ...

and, consequently, of what is considered to be the first motion picture, thanks to the

Lumière brothers Lumière is French for 'light'. Lumiere, Lumière or Lumieres may refer to: *Lumières, the philosophical movement in the Age of Enlightenment People *Auguste and Louis Lumière, French pioneers in film-making Film and TV * Institut Lumière, a ...

. Fascinated by this new technology, Pion and his friend Fumagalli start importing early

Pathé Frères Pathé or Pathé Frères (, styled as PATHÉ!) is the name of various French businesses that were founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France starting in 1896. In the early 1900s, Pathé became the world's largest film equipmen ...

equipment.

Professional career

A few years later, in 1908, Pion and Fumagalli decide to produce their own movie equipment, and they start the Fumagalli, Pion & C. company. The business goes on with highs and lows until the beginning of

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, when both men are enrolled to the army and forced to momentarily abandon their work. After 1918, Pion resumes his old job on his own and renames his firm Officine Pio Pion. With cinemas becoming more and more popular, Pion enjoys the most successful period of his working life. The ''Officine'' relocate to a larger location in via Rovereto in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard language, Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the List of cities in Italy, second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 ...

. The

fascist Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the ...

regime looked favourably on Pion's company, especially after he invented the so-called ''camion sonoro'' (sound-lorry), a lorry mounted on a

Fiat 508 The 508 Balilla was a compact car designed and developed by Fiat in 1932. It was, effectively, the replacement of the Fiat 509, although production of the earlier model had ceased back in 1929. It had a three-speed transmission (increased to fou ...

wheelbase carrying a screen and a movie projector, which, apart from playing films, could also bring propagandist speeches around the major squares.

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

brought another halt to the company's production, as it was arranged for it to produce

Morse code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one ...

-machinery. At the end of the conflict, Pion once again resumed his job and was joined by his two sons, Pierandrea and Riccardo. In the sixties Pion left the business to his sons and retired. He died in 1965, aged 78.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pion, Pio 1887 births 1965 deaths People from Varese 20th-century Italian engineers 20th-century Italian inventors