Ecat was founded in 1971 as a business venture by brothers Amilcare and Sergio Gallo to manufacture monumental clocks for churches and town halls. The key to their success lay in offering an innovative product - no longer custom-made products but ones manufactured on a large scale for distribution across the largest possible area via an efficient sales network. Pursuing this aim, Ecat started out with electromechanical clocks before soon afterwards introducing electronic ones. Thanks to their quality and easy installation and transportation, Ecat expanded its market, initially nationwide and then across Europe. In the 1990s, the company flanked its monumental clock production with that of industrial clocks and began supplying public and private firms. A new generation of products then appeared - all-electronic clocks. In 1995, the Ecat bells foundry was established to complete the church-product range following its takeover of the longstanding Fonderia Mazzola Achille of Valduggia, dating from 1404. The first positive results came in 1998 when the fledgling Ecat received craft excellence recognition from the Piemonte Region. Our accomplishments include: a bell cast for a scene in the Master and Commander, a colossal 2003 hit starring Russel Crowe; a bell that tolls every 11 September in the Millburn Fire Department in memory of colleagues who died as heroes at the Twin Towers; and a bell ordered by the Grimaldi family for their chapel in Monaco. For the "2015 Operae" design fair (in Palazzo Cavour, Turin), craft tradition met cutting-edge technology when Amilcare Gallo and designer Riccardo Blumer created a bell that produces sound without a clapper. The decoration on the bell's surface features an alternate on-off sequence, the 0 and 1 of the binary code, focused on the interference between the physical and non-physical worlds. This object may be far removed from contemporary life but it continues to transmit a vibratile and topical tempo. Returning to the subject of industrial clocks, Ecat continues to invest in R&D, manufacturing products that incorporate innovative technology such as the Cityclock street clock with a self-correcting time and GPS sensor. There are also partnerships with Italian companies of excellence such as the renowned automobile firm Pagani, for which Ecat created a large outdoor clock for the new Modena factory in 2016.