Italian Super-Power

Italy, on its 119,242 sq. mi. of mountainous country, supports a population of 39,989,385 souls. The support is poor. Half of the people work on farms. Most of the others work in factories. The factory workers, although quick, industrious and intelligent, are not robust. They can do only light work.

Italy has about 250,000 factories, of which less than 10% employ 10 or more persons each. Few good highways, little mineral resources and especially a paucity of coal mines hamper the factories. They must import almost all their raw materials. Expensive materials and frail employes explain why textiles constitute the chief manufactured products of Italy, why food products come next, why steel and engineering industries have progressed slowly. If Italy had at least cheap motive power for her factories, they could become larger, more numerous and more productive of diversified goods. And Italy has in her mountains great stores of potential power--her precipitate rivers. Great electric power companies have built hydroelectric plants from the Alps down along the Apennines and in Sicily. They produced two years ago 7,600 millions kilowatts of electricity. That was less than 200 kilowatts for each person in Italy (the U. S. last year supplied 627 kilowatts per person) and not enough. The Italian plants can expand to the great profit of the whole country. Such were points behind the incorporation in Delaware last week of the $33,000,000 Italian Superpower Corporation. With funds acquired through Bonbright & Co., Field, Glore & Co., and the Banca Commerciale Italiana Trust Co. (all of Manhattan) and under the presidency of Landon K. Thorne (president of Bonbright & Co. and of United Utilities Co. and director in half a dozen other U. S. public utilities), Italian Superpower Corp. is to supply money and technical advice to 13 of the largest Italian electricity producers.