ERCOLE BOTTANI

Professor at the Milan Polytechnic (Volpago del Montello, Tv 1897 - Milan 1978). A teacher at the Polytechnic, at the end of World War II he was commissioner for electricity in Upper Italy. In 1955, together with the rector of the Politecnico Gino Cassinis, he founded the Center for numerical calculations, the first electronic computing center in Europe. In the 1960s, he promoted the construction of the Milanese Metro. The origins of DEI date back to 1928, the year the Institute of Electrical Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano was founded. But its official history begins in 1940 when Ercole Bottani, professor of Electrical Engineering, undertakes the study of electrical networks for automatic calculation. These are the years in which the interest of the international scientific community in technological applications that allow the automatic resolution of complex mathematical systems is progressively growing.


Intervista al prof. Vito Amoia

1. Good morning Professor Amoia. We would like you to illustrate the figure of Ercole Bottani.
He said he was an "airy" Milanese, he came from the Treviso countryside. He wore a three-piece tailor's shop, but wore a pair of reinforced boots over half-moon iron heels, to limit the wear of leather. He was an eccentric professor; he entered the classroom preceded by the clatter of irons on the wooden floors, tall and well-fed, with a dazzling smile. He had conducted his higher studies in an Institute for Technical Experts and perhaps for this reason too he was a man with a "difficult pen". Ercole Bottani, in fact, made many discoveries, while avoiding the publication of most of them. He actually wrote some books, calling them "notes": he wrote the first volume with the help of Professor Sartori, but he did not put his name among the authors, unlike what he did for the second volume, which he published with Luigi Dadda.
2. What course of studies did you complete?
As we have said, Ercole Bottani graduated from a Technical Institute and this type of training influenced his personality as a researcher, inducing him to prefer practical applications to theoretical work. He then graduated with 110 cum laude in General Electrical Engineering with Professor Angelo Barbagelata. In the competition for the extraordinary chair of Electrical Measurements he came second, but still got the place, because the Polytechnic, regardless of the results of the competitions, selected the minds that it considered most suitable for its structure. Shortly after, Professor Ferdinando Lori, Full Professor of General Electrical Engineering, retired and Bottani was called to hold that position. When Professor Vecchiacchi, Director of the Electronic Telecommunications Section, died, Ercole Bottani took his place, also making use of the success that this discipline achieved in the world: in fact, vacuum tube TV was just born.
3. What were your works on the patatoid?
Thanks to his training and the working method he had developed in the Milan area, he placed the problem at the center of his research and practice, not theory. All this allowed him to have a specific attention towards reality and to develop more applicative knowledge.
Such an approach pushed him to take different paths than those outlined by physics and to move away from the fundamental principles of that discipline, such as Maxwell's equation. Bottani was not based on this equation, as it is very complex at a mathematical level, but above all because it relates to the Theory of Continuous. In fact, one of the objectives of physicists is to formulate laws that depend only on the matter of the system. The problem is that the density cannot be measured directly with any type of instrument, unlike the other quantities. Bottani, influenced by the contemporary current of thought of Positivism, came to consider the "patatoid", by means of which, through the point of
he asked, he guaranteed himself the possibility of analyzing a system, regardless of what material it is made of.
4. Could you tell us about Professor Bottani's commitment to the reconstruction of Italy after the war?
One day he asked me what aroused my curiosity, and I replied: “Anything that moves electrically”. "Old stuff" he remarked, "I will recommend you to my neighbors at the Institute of Industrial Electrotechnics". So it was that, in the mid-60s, I became Assistant in Charge of Electric Machines at the Polytechnic.
Since then I began to reflect on the “works and days” of my reference teacher, to draw a life lesson from it. In fact, my professor's boots had long since left an indelible mark on the Milanese soil, together with the most elegant shoes of politicians and entrepreneurs, actors of the Italian industrial and economic miracle of the 1950s. Before, during and after the Second War Worldwide, the proximity between the company and the university quickly led to the full reconstruction of the electrical industry following the destruction of the war period.
Ercole Bottani, well integrated into the environment, at the end of the conflict made a significant contribution to the reconstruction of the productive fabric of Italy at the time: as Commissioner for Electricity of Upper Italy he obtained great recognition for the qualities of mediator in the breakdown of electricity. In fact, at that time, electricity was an asset of limited availability, disputed between its use for industrial and civil use. These political skills, in 1956, allowed him in the first place to design and then to found the Italian Experimental Electrotechnical Center (CESI): it was the National Laboratory of Electronic Measurements and Experiments. The Italian companies in the sector, all privately owned, contributed financially to the foundation.
In the same period Bottani took a lively part in the political and industrial labor that led, in 1955, to the approval by the Ministry of Transport of the project for the first line of the Milanese underground, presented by the City Council of Mayor Virgilio Ferrari, operational from 1951 to 1961. The mayor belonged to the so-called "Center Alliance" formed by the Christian Democrats and smaller parties, with the exception of the Left parties. On the occasion, the Italian government specified that it would not allocate funds to finance the work: Milan would have to independently find the necessary economic resources.
The subway would have had a profound impact on the social and urban fabric of the territory and would have absorbed a large part of the users of surface transport, managed by ATM, whose staff were historically oriented to the left. Furthermore, the work appeared impossible because the Municipality of Milan did not have sufficient resources, due to budgetary constraints and in the absence of companies interested in carrying out the work in exchange for a profit sharing. The Town Council solved the financial problem in 1956 by creating a company open to private financing, MM SpA, chaired by Ercole Bottani, the most popular and reliable technician in the Milan area. On the basis of the statute, MM SpA, with a public majority, would have provided for the construction and management of underground transport; the profits would also have been used for the design and construction of a second line.
The ATM and the political left, at the time, took the blow. But during the construction works, from 1956 to 1964, the wind of politics changed direction, because new balances
parliamentarians promoted the so-called "organic center", made up exclusively of Christian Democrats and Socialists. This alliance had Milan as an experimental center of ideological planning of the new political direction, aimed, in particular, at the reorganization of the economy on a public basis. According to the new directives Piero Bassetti, in 1961, attacked the addresses of the mayor Ferrari stating that it was necessary to consider transport as a lever for social development and territorial planning, even at the cost of public deficits. This vision involved the exclusion of private individuals from the ownership of transport systems and their complete reliance on ATM as a manager subject to the political directives of the Executive. A little later, in 1962, the Fanfani government nationalized the electricity companies and entrusted their management, in 1963, to the National Authority for Electricity (ENEL). The municipal elections of 1961 saw the victory of the organic center-left and Gino Cassinis, former rector of the Polytechnic, became the new mayor: Ercole Bottani was politically in full conflict with his rector!
The Cassinis junta decided to buy the privately owned shares of MM SpA, to entrust the management of metro line 1 to ATM and to transform MM SpA into a company for the design and construction of the Milanese metro lines. The professor. Bottani resigned from the presidency of MM excluding, as he reported to Corriere Della Sera, of being able to remain at the head of an organization forced to suffer the reflection of the agreements between the parties. There were no further opportunities for public engagement for him.
5. What was Professor Bottani's conception of the world and reality?
A contemporary of Einstein, Chaplin, protagonist of his time on the wave of positivism, Bottani invented the patatoid that represents his scientific thought and more: it can represent his Weltanschauung.
6. What lesson can a person like Ercole Bottani leave us?
Here is the life lesson of my reference teacher: you need to draw your bow and shoot your arrows towards the future, while being certain that every real man will have his own Waterloo. Although my way of thinking and acting was more in tune with that of Piero Basetti, Gino Cassinis, Amintore Fanfani, Adriano Olivetti, Piero Gobetti, I feel the urge to pay homage to those who, in good faith and profitably, have expressed a different thought and course of action. In this spirit, in 1994, as President of ATM, I went to the mezzanine of the Piola station to affix a plaque in memory of the founder of the Milanese underground and to remind students of the life lesson of "my" professor, Ercole Bottani.