The beginnings of Oronzio De Nora

Oronzio De Nora was born in Altamura, in the province of Bari, on March 19, 1899. His story, however, began many years earlier, with another Oronzio De Nora, his paternal grandfather, a designer and installer of engines on steamboats. After numerous visits to the Far East, grandfather Oronzio returned home and was commissioned by the municipality of Altamura to build a factory with a mill for grinding wheat, a bakery, and a pasta manufacturing machine. The factory was to work with the energy provided by a steam engine. This was back in 1860, and there was no aqueduct or watercourse nearby in Altamura. Oronzio De Nora's grandfather, however, had the gift of creativity: he architected a rational system for gathering rainwater from the roofs of the houses, combining it with an ingenious system for collecting the water that flowed by the roadside, exploiting the natural slope of the land and building a series of cisterns downstream from the village. The water from those cisterns would then feed the steam boiler, allowing the mill to work. The new ovens of Altamura produced loaves of bread now famous throughout Italy and known as "Altamura bread."

Some fifty years after the construction of the Altamura mill, Oronzio De Nora was a student, good above all at arithmetic and science. Little Oronzio often visited the aqueduct of Altamura, of which his father, Michele De Nora, was the engineer in charge. For little Oronzio, his father Michele was an irreplaceable point of reference. During his trips with his father, Oronzio sharpened his love of science, acquired a lifestyle, and laid the foundations to consolidate that philosophy of work and commitment that would have never left him. His father showed him the technical details of the new aqueduct. He taught his son the secrets of the materials and the pleasure of manual labor, which is not an appendix of the design phase, but the noble moment in which the ideas are brought to perfection and plans are turned into reality. Oronzio De Nora was still little more than a child, but he was already a genius: he had to become aware of it. His father was giving him the tools to listen to his talent, understand it, and govern it.

In November 1916, Oronzio De Nora enrolled in the Physics and Mathematics course at the University of Naples. Once he graduated, he moved to Milan to enroll in Industrial Engineering at the Milan Polytechnic and joined the prestigious "Carlo Erba" School of Electrical Engineering during his senior year. In the winter of 1922, Oronzio De Nora had just graduated in Industrial Engineering: a new life was beginning for him. The time had come to practice his father's teaching, that philosophy of life he had learned during trips to the aqueduct of Altamura.

> The Electro-chemistry Choice