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Revision as of 21:34, 11 October 2011
1933 - 1935
OMC or Oemmeci built a wide range of mopeds in Budrio (Bologna), designed by John Ladetto using Morini and Minarelli engines. The most interesting bikes were the Wild Cat Elite H20, a liquid cooled turbine with a four speed transmission and a front brake disc, the Wild Cat Tire Max-L, with the same basic characteristics, an enduro desert "bike", a motorcycle like jeep with disc brake front and rear.
History
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the small cluster of Gerace Marina, today Locri and then village of Gerace, took a strong and autonomous development potential, given the realization of railroad Jonica who had put the area in conjunction with the center and north. Hopes for further development were grown with the foundation of BPCC (National Bank of Rural District Gerace) and the transfer of Court.
In the early 1920s Vincent Bruzzese, young engineer of Diatto origins Grottesi, decided to return to his land native to an industrial high-tech implant that could shake the stagnation of the area controlled by agrarian landlordism.
Enthusiastic fervor of the technology now common throughout northern Italy, decided to bring in Calabria some workers metalworkers Turin, with their families, and they organize a local production . The factory and housing for employees were quickly prepared on land owned by the family in nearby Gerace Marina and the company was founded in 1924, starting with the production of various bolts.
The attention to materials and experience already acquired by Piedmont craftsmen, led immediately to a high quality product, attracting major foreign companies also committed. Regarding the hardware, for example, the company could count on a large sample of over 700 articles for various types and sizes and, in the late '20s, won a contract to supply complete construction of the famous Transatlantic Rex of bolts, pins, rivets and nails.
Factory launched out quickly and in 1930 already had 200 employees. The modern conception of Bruzzese and social work led him to build a space dedicated to after work, where the workers could devote to reading and recreation and rest. It created a scandal in the area, adding to already alarming news that one of the "blue collar" of the WTO there are also some forty women. Event almost unthinkable in this place and at that time.
That same year, the workshops received the inspection visit of a commission of Engineers declared that the WTO "Company Auxiliary State" with permission to provide materials to the Naval Arsenal Taranto by Taranto and Ministry of Communications for the Railway. Also, was inserted between the workshops, in case of war, were mobilized for the construction of aircraft engine.
Given the institutional and commercial vested awards, combined with the ease with which his countrymen passed by the state of laborers to skilled workers in engineering, Bruzzese decided it was time to deal with a production of more complex, like a motorcycle . For the design andknow howjoined the Turin John Ladetto, a major technical era, known at the time of Diatto, who with his brother, Emilio Ladetto, did the engine and chassis.
In 1931 The WTO 175 was put on the market, immediately appreciated and sold all over Italy, because of the excellent relationship between quality and price. The following year, 12 motorcycle riders of the WTO opened the show on Via dei Fori Imperiali, during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome.
Success does not encroach on the creative frenzy of Bruzzese already working with new engines 250 and 500 cm3, a mysterious airplane to vertical takeoff called "air motorcycle" and a radial engine 's aircraft, whose project was approved in 1933 by Air Ministry that appropriated the sum of 20 million Italian lira (₤) for future production.
Everything seemed to be doing well, when Vincent Bruzzese was fraudulently charged for the shortfall amounted to ₤ 6,000,000 which caused the failure of the Banca Popolare di Gerace. Immediately arrested, industrial, he was sentenced and said the failure of the WTO in timerecordof weeks.
Despite the stubborn resistance of the workers who remained at work without pay during the 1934, the receiver, officially appointed in order to restart production, the Eng. Franco, broke up the company, sold the machines, fired the workers and let the records lost or destroyed and go technique.
It ended well, after a decade of success, the brief experience of Mechanical Workshops Calabresi.
With O.ME.CA. in 1961, Finmeccanica was founded in Reggio Calabria company for the production of rolling stock.
The social experiment
Enabling the establishment of WTO Gerace Marina was an example of labor migration from north to south, very unusual in Italy. The immediate integration of families in the Piedmont and Calabria land training from nothing to a factory capable of performing complex technical articles and in a short time, to produce its own technology in financial autonomy, created high hopes for redemption in the population of the area, mainly composed of poor farm laborers.
The landowners of Locri (Calabria) soon realized the enormous damage that such a holding could cause them, freeing the traditional labor underpaid, brutalized by ignorance, misery and secular submission to local lords.
Four years after the arrest, the Salerno Court recognized the innocence of Vincent Bruzzese, including those responsible for the failure of the WTO among the largest shareholders of the failed bank and charging them the recoverable damages.
Nevertheless, the company had now disappeared and the bureaucracy, the loss of valuable technical files, followed by World War II, Bruzzese asked of every opportunity to start over. During his imprisonment, he had bitterly and prophetically wrote in his diary: "Never again, remember, your country will rise again like a beacon of civilization and prosperity. (...) And remember too, yet you used to live on the narrowness of feeling "bourgeois", who know nothing to create, though immensely rich, for the civil progress of the region."
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