Many objects that have been – and still are – part of our daily lives are the result of inventions great and small. Inventions that are examples of Italian creativity and ingenuity, and that have written the history of companies and of the Made in Italy label.

“Every day, inventions are made that cause no sensation but simply try to improve and extend our happiness.” Thus we read in an article entitled “Inventions without history” published in Pirelli magazine no. 3 of 1950. Great little sparks of genius that, in the 1950s, helped make people’s lives more comfortable and pleasant. For example, one object that was as simple as it was useful was the ski rack patented by Pirelli in 1950, and then made on an industrial scale by Kartell, a company at the forefront of innovative applications for plastics. The Kartell K101 ski rack was invented by the engineer Carlo Barassi, a genius in the research and development of Pirelli tyres and a great mountain enthusiast: when faced with the task of handling ropes and cables to fasten his skis on the roof of his car in the freezing cold he was inspired to come up with a simple, practical solution for keeping objects well tied down. And this is what he came up with: a series of elements in Nastro Cord, a rubberised fabric that he himself had patented for Pirelli in 1948, resting on foam rubber pads so as not to damage the car. The idea appealed to the architect and designer Roberto Menghi, who decided to join Barassi in drawing up the patent: the friendship between Menghi and Giulio Castelli, the owner of Kartell, simply closed the circle of the K101. Castelli himself had been a student under Giulio Natta at the Politecnico University of Milan and, once again, paths crossed, because Natta had invented a synthetic rubber for Pirelli back in the late 1930s.

The studies carried out in the Bicocca laboratories proved to be fundamental for the subsequent invention of polyethylene, a discovery that earned Natta a Nobel Prize. Polyethylene was a path to new inventions: “The most diverse objects can be made out of polyethylene”, wrote Franco Vegliani in “The glass of the future will be like rubber”, an article in Pirelli magazine no. 6 of 1950, “a resin that can be blown like glass, but with the advantage of being unbreakable.” The Pirelli factory of Azienda Monza thus started turning out polyethylene containers for everyday use, like the innovative jerry can for carrying petrol. Designed by Roberto Menghi, it went on display at none other than MoMA in New York. Research into plastics continued with the invention of materials like Resivite and Kelesite, used for building boats, while the foam rubber that had inspired Barassi’s ski rack and that was making armchairs and seats more comfortable found new life in the hands of the designer Bruno Munari. This sort of “rubber frappé, of the purest rubber” as Munari himself referred to it, became a collection of toys, thanks to his fervid imagination. Meo Romeo the cat, in reinforced foam rubber, was born in 1949, and was joined in 1953 by Zizì the monkey, which the following year won the Compasso d’Oro, a truly prestigious accolade in the world of design. A luggage rack in elastic fabric, a polyethylene container, a synthetic fibre boat, a foam rubber cat: give a genius a new material and something infinitely useful and creative will come out of it…