Michele Natale Salvati
Michele Natale Salvati (c1881-1919)
1919 Obituary [1]
MICHELE NATALE SALVATI, born in Ancona, Italy, died on December 29, 1918, at the early age of twenty-eight.
From his boyhood he had devoted all his energies to the study of literature and many of the sciences, and this love of knowledge persisted throughout his busy industrial life. He was essentially a self-made man, and began to work very early, and very modestly. A born leader of men, he kept himself well informed by wide study - he was a master of many foreign languages - by extensive travels, and by everyday works practice. He made a study of engineering for the love of the subject.
As a commercial and industrial man he was the first in Italy to develop the manufacture of special non-ferrous alloys, and founded in Turin the Italian Special Bronze Company, which produced new types of copper alloys and aluminium alloys, which were extensively used both in the Army and Navy and in mechanical operations.
More recently he joined the board of the Stabilimenti Biak, Limited, in Turin, as general commercial director, and as special adviser on alloys. After two years' service in this position he was appointed General Manager, which post he held only a few days until his decease. Notwithstanding his business responsibilities, his industrial preoccupations, and his frequent journeys throughout Europe—more especially in England, which he knew so well and loved as his own country - this specialist in metal production and the metal trade was able to find time to devote to political, historical, and geographical problems, to read Plato and Newton, to annotate Filone's Essays, and to prepare some important works on the Life of the Count of Cavour, and on the Bagdad Railway. This latter work, printed after his death, proved of great interest, while of the unfinished work on Cavour one essay only has been published (in an Italian Review), together with other studies on economical and political matters.
His prospects as a man of letters and a man of action were brilliant, for he possessed both imagination and "go," and the power of getting the best out of those with whom he was associated. By his death a most promising career has been cut short at an early age. H
e was elected a member of the Institute on December 21, 1916, and was also a member of the American Geographical Society, and of many Italian Associations.