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Born in the family residence next door to the Milan plant, Alberto Pirelli grew up with the acrid smell of strong chemicals and hot rubber in his nose. At 21 he joined the company, soon proved his talent for promotion and boosting sales. To give the company's auto-tire business a push, he sponsored a 10,000-mile Peking-Paris drive in 1907. In Paris the next year he became the first Italian ever to ride in an airplane (with Orville Wright, for ten minutes, at an altitude of 30 ft.), was inspired to start making and selling free balloons and dirigibles. A Pirelli airship, the Norge, carried Roald Amundsen across the North Pole.
Bags for Vegetables. At his father's death in 1932 Alberto Pirelli took over the company, led it through its worst disaster—World War II, which left the company's machinery smashed, its warehouses empty, its workers disorganized and ripe for Communist conquest. Pirelli scoured Milan for temporary offices and all Italy for capital. With Marshall Plan funds, and U.S. machinery pouring into Italy, he was able to build five brand new factories, refurbish his old plants with automatic machine tools and Detroit-style conveyors.
From wartime frogman equipment he adapted skindiving suits, became Europe's biggest producer of rubber fins and rafts. With U.S.'s Visking Corp. (plastics) Pirelli worked out a license deal, is now taking Italy's vegetables out of open street stalls and packaging them in polyethylene bags. But Pirelli's biggest business is still tires, notably racing tires. Pirelli will design a tire for a particular race, even different stretches of the same race, depending on whether the course is over mountains (where heavy tires are needed) or a flat straightaway (where light-walled tires are needed to dissipate the heat).
Guns For Revolt. Though he is a shy and patrician cosmopolitan, Pirelli has proved himself one of Italy's best tacticians at dealing with the Communist-run CGIL unions. For decades the Pirellis—like other Italian industrialists—kept their underpaid workers toiling in stifling, smoky factories for long hours, thereby presented Communist organizers with a readymade example of capitalism exploiting the worker. After World War II Pirelli workers openly formed factory Soviets, boldly seized and briefly ran one plant. Less than four years ago anti-Communist police squads pulled surprise raids in Milan, uncovered in one Pirelli plant a Red arsenal that included scores of machine guns, three 20-mm. cannon, seven bazookas, 700 rifles and Tommy guns.
To defeat the Communists' militant spirit with propaganda, Pirelli followed a simple, highly effective strategy: he began sharing the fruits of free enterprise with his workers. As he improved factory conditions, building modern plants in place of the smoky sweatboxes workers once knew, he added a free medical, surgical and hospital plan (cost to the company: $1,600,000 annually), also built modern, low-cost housing for 7,180 Pirelli families.