The Ginori Manufactory was the first Italian factory to produce porcelain for electrotechnical use. In the 1850s, it supplied insulators to the Telegraph Administration of the Papal State and, after the Unification of Italy (1861), began producing those intended for the kingdom's telegraph lines.
Following the merger between the Ceramica Richard of San Cristoforo and the Ginori Manufactory (1896), production continued at the Colonnata factory. Subsequently, the Rifredi plant (from 1906), La Spezia (from 1927), Livorno (from 1939), and Verbano (from 1965) were added.
Electrotechnical porcelain, which constituted an important part of the manufactory’s production, was intended for both civil and industrial installations and was used for telegraph, telephone, and railway lines, for radio antennas, and generally for electrical systems at low, high, and very high voltages.
At the Doccia headquarters, a testing room had been specially installed, visible in some period photographs preserved in the Ginori Museum’s photographic archive. Richard-Ginori’s insulator production was not only aimed at the domestic market but also at exports, adopting classical forms from other European countries.
The image shows several types of insulators produced by Richard-Ginori. The first internal pass-through insulator in white porcelain with a flared shape, used for medium and high voltage electrical line cables, shows the production date, 1935, on its mark. The other, also in white porcelain and dated 1928, is a rigid three-bell pin insulator intended for medium voltage electrical installations. The last, a grooved insulator glazed in brown, is an outdoor pass-through insulator for medium and high voltage, dated 1978. From a certain point onward, Richard-Ginori began indicating with a letter impressed on the mark which factory had produced the items. On the brown insulator, the “L” visible above the company mark identified the Livorno plant.
