Kamil Tolon

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Kamil Özdemir Tolon (29 February 1912 – 23 July 1978) was a Turkish businessperson, industrialist and inventor, known for the first manufacture of an electric engine in Turkey. Tolon was born in 1912 in Istanbul. He had his secondary and university education in Ankara. He wanted to become an engineer, but went to the Ankara University Faculty of Law instead due to the lack of engineering schools. He graduated in 1935, and started working as a Posta ve Telgraf Teşkilatı (lit. transl. Post and Telegraph Agency: PTT) inspector after university, but left the job not long after. After moving to Bursa, he founded Tolon Makina in 1937, where he started to produce several machines. In 1944, he was drafted into the army, where he continued working on new inventions to be used for the army. After returning from the army, Tolon started producing combine harvesters, water pumps, washing machines and dishwashers. While initially using imported engines, he was later compelled to build his own engine by Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and made the first indigenously manufactured electric engine in Turkey. Tolon moved to a new factory after a fire damaged his workshop in 1958. The factory started production in 1960 and resulted in an increase of sales. He was a founding member of the Justice Party and became a chairman at the Bursa Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Regarded as one of the most important figures in Turkish industrialism, Kamil Tolon died in 1978 in Geneva, Switzerland, from an embolism.