Alessandro Cruto

The inventor who lighted Turin

152 years ago, on 18th July 1847, Alessandro Cruto was born in Piossasco.

 

His early dream was to find a way to produce artificial diamonds and, while trying out some new materials, he discovered something absolutely new. He had few means to work with; yet, his intelligence and intuition led him to a result which Edison had not reached, in spite of his good economic possibilities. After a lesson of Professor Galileo Ferraris in 1879, he realised that he had got out of his experiments a filament with all the features necessary to solve the problem of electric lighting. After plenty of experiments he managed to produce small carbon blades which, when warmed up by electric current blazed with light, and were commercially exploitable too. Therefore, on May 16th 1883, the town where he was born, Piossasco, had the honour to be the first town electrically lighted, thanks to Cruto's achievements.Even if Cruto had lighted Carlo Felice square in Turin in April 1881, he did not gain the same success as Edison, who lighted Place de la Concorde in Paris in December of the same year. The quality of bulbs produced in Piedmont was higher than that one of American bulbs. Yet, considering the high investments necessary to raise Crudo's society to American levels, Italian industrialists chose to buy Edison's system. In his fifties Alessandro handed over his activity of producer to his partners and went back to his experiments. He died serenely and humbly as he had lived in Piossasco in 1908.

 

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