Franco Tosi is an Italian engineering business currently concentrated on the production of Turbines, Boilers, Heat exchangers and pumps. It is located in Legnano near Milan. The firm was created during the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century by the engineer Franco Tosi .History and productsFranco Tosi grew out of an engineering business called, originally, Cantoni Krumm & C., which Tosi himself joined as Technical Director in 1876. The firm had originated a couple of years earlier (1874) as a producer, primarily, of textile machinery, but under Tosi’s leadership it rapidly reinvented itself as a producer of steam engines, which Tosi had developed for use as the power source for industrial looms. These formed the basis for the company’s rapid growth in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Tosi soon became a shareholder, and in 1881 the company also took his name. In 1894 he became the sole shareholder.Some time later in 1907, the business diversified into the production of diesel engines, which was then a rapidly growing market sector. For a time Ettore Maserati, one of the five brothers who later founded Maserati, worked as a designer of diesel engines for “Franco Tosi”, which was also cooperating with the motorbike producer, Emilio Bozzi.In 1914, shortly before the start of the First World War, Tosi established as a subsidiary business a shipyard at Taranto in the south of the country for the production of submarines and ships, destined primarily for the Italian navy. During the 1920s a submarine from this shipyard achieved a world-wide depth record, descending to 75 meters below sea level.