Aldo Marsili, the founder of the company and father of the current managing director, started his career in his uncles’ workshop, working with the first agricultural engines. In the water sector he designed a neighbourhood fountain with a lever mechanism.
The advent of the first engines on fishing boats gave new traction to the young Aldo Marsili, who took charge of assembling and testing the engines on board.
This work made him well known among seafarers, who respected him as a tireless and reliable technician — so much so that he soon turned his attention to other onboard equipment, the steering system among them.
His boat-owner friends told him: «at the helm we struggle too much, and having to be at the manual tiller does not allow us to easily follow the fishing operations — it seems we need another person on board».
Aldo was also a keen reader and often travelled to work in other ports: he was familiar with hydraulics used in steering systems.
As fate would have it, in the mid 1950s a friend on a fishing trip pulled in the nets and brought up a watertight sea chest containing books on submarine hydraulic systems. The volumes were handed to Aldo, who had them translated and studied them in the basement of his father’s house, verifying with diagrams and experiments what he was reading.
That same basement saw, in 1957, the birth of Marsili Hydraulics — Civitanova Marche, and with it the start of production of hydraulic steering gear for fishing vessels.