Perini Navi - Part 1

by Marilyn M. Mower

Growing up in the 1960s in Tuscany’s Lucca valley, a center of Italy’s paper industry since the 17th century, Fabio Perini did as previous generations of his family had done and entered the paper-making business. Although demand for the products was skyrocketing at the time, Italy’s paper companies remained largely artisanal operations—small specialty companies operating slow, cumbersome machines. The young Perini, gifted with mechanical genius and possessing an aversion to the status quo, began sketching machines that would ultimately revolutionize the paper industry.

At age 17, he invented a machine for his family’s business that efficiently converted huge spindles of creped tissue into individual retail-size rolls. More significantly, he designed variable tension gearing for the machine so that it could process tissue one day and industrial toweling the next. The invention became the cornerstone of Fabio Perini SpA, which he founded in 1966 and which is now one of the world’s leading producers of tissue-converting machinery.

As Perini’s success grew, he began to indulge his passion for sailing by acquiring a series of successively larger boats. In those days, sailing required muscles and leather gloves to control flailing lines and sails that flapped over an obstacle course of deck hardware. The bigger the boat, the more able-bodied friends or professional crew members were required to control the beast. Perini wanted to sail large boats, but he also wanted to enjoy the serenity of the sport, which was difficult to do with such a crowd on board.

In the 1980s, he began searching for a boat large enough to cross oceans, but shallow enough to enter Viareggio’s harbor and designed for a single individual or a family to sail. When he found that such a boat did not exist, he decided to invent it. Perini’s primary goal was to replace with electric motors the muscle that harnessed the sails. From his paper business, he was familiar with how to roll material around drums, and he recognized that a winch is essentially a vertical drum. If a winch, he determined, could be made to hold all the rope of a halyard or a sheet instead of just a few wraps, it would simplify the process of harnessing the sails and eliminate all those flailing lines. And if such a winch could take up the line, it also should be able to let it out.