Nicolò Tron (diplomat)

A Venetian noble, Tron was a young ambassador of the Republic of Venice at the English court; back in Italy, he tried to import the technological and organizational innovations seen abroad, founding the Schio woolen mill, organizing his agricultural estates with modern criteria and activating himself in using his political influence to favor and encourage his own Venetian businesses.

Within a year, at 3 October 1712, she gave him his first-born son Andrea, which in turn would begin a brilliant political career, becoming the so-called "paròn del Senato" ("Master of the Senate").

To the court environment, however Tron preferred to be associated to scientists and mathematicians, such as Isaac Newton, who appointed him Fellow of the Royal Society,[2] and John Theophilus Desaguliers, French mathematician and physicist who founded on 14 June 1714 the Grand Lodge, or the modern masonry, and entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Berck, a famous panni-lani manufacturer who showed him the most modern techniques used in England for such of manufactures.

The government of Venice was not particularly pleased for the life his ambassador was conducting, and after sending him some letters recalling his duties, he decided to support him with a sort of lieutenant, a knight Giacomo Querini, whose presence was accepted and endured from Tron without any particular problem.

The technology was still rudimentary and few efficient, but Tron understood their importance and he had made English technicians come in Italy to recreate that machine in his rural hold in Anguillara Veneta, in order to reclaim marshy areas.

But this didn't prevent to Tron to create identical machines in the hills around Schio, in areas call Tretto, to use them on the drainage of water in the mines of kaolin and carbon.

So he chose to build his factory in Schio: this municipality had recently (1701) obtained from Vicenza the permission to produce the so-called high cloths, that is the finest fabrics and those intended for export.

The reasons of this crisis were studied a lot and can be listed as: Nicolò Tron was mostly known, at his time, as a politician involved in the economy and finance of the Republic of Venice, for his peers.

After that, and after other events and ownership pasteures, the business was owned by Alessandro Rossi, the founder of Lanerossi, one of the major textile industries in the world in the second half of the 18th century.