In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the inside of

the compression chamber was lined with bronze; the piston

was made of metal and the die of copper. The piston
packed
the kneaded dough into the compression chamber and
further kneaded and forced it out through the die. By the
end of the nineteenth century, steam- and hydraulic-
powered machines were used to make pasta, but the press
continued to be a barrier to speed and efficiency because it
required the drawing out of the piston to repack the
chamber after each batch of dough
was pushed through. In 1922 Ferréol Sandragné built an end-
less screw (or worm) that advanced dough continuously for
the Grands Moulins de Corbeil pasta factory in Toulouse,
France. This technology is notably one of the mainstays of

Wooden pasta press from the Barilla Pasta Museum.

manufacturing processes today and is used not only for
making foods for humans and animals, but for making
other products such as pellets for the plastics industry.
This concept was
improved upon several times and in 1933 the Milanese
company
M. & G. Braibanti launched the first generation of an
industrial pasta-making press that was capable of
automatically and con- tinuously mixing, kneading and
forming. Just four years later, Braibanti integrated an
assembly of machines for the synchron- ized continuous
production of pasta, including the proportioning of
ingredients, mixing, kneading and forming. Drying was the
only process not integrated. The line was presented at the
Fair of Milan in 1937 and Buhler of Switzerland subsequently
commercialized automatic pasta-making, except for drying.
Drying is the most sensitive phase of the entire pasta-
making process and the pasta makers guarded this
4
knowledge zealously to protect their trade. Neapolitan
pasta maintained supremacy for as long as the drying was
natural. That the region around Naples was uniquely
endowed with a climate that suited pasta makers was
realized only when other regions tried to adopt industrial
pasta production. The alternating warm, humid scirocco and
the dry, cool tramontana favoured the complex and delicate
process of drying and it rarely took more than ten days to
dry even the bulkiest forms of pasta. Industrial production
of pasta in other regions struggled with drying, which was
labour-intensive and risky because of its suscept- ibility to
souring, mildew, fermentation and other damages. Machine
tool companies and pasta manufacturers experi- mented
with different types of artificial drying methods; the
economical benefits of mechanized drying was apparent
from the twenty or so patents filed between 1875 and 1904.
The Milanese industrialist Vitaliano Tommasini made the
important
contribution of drying pasta in three stages, a concept
seminal to all future dryers. Artificial drying soon became
the de facto