Kongsberg silver

The man who brought the first silver to market was arrested for selling it too cheaply.

Kongsberg Solvverk worked at Kongsberg in Buskerud county for 335 years, from 1623 until 1958, across more than 80 separate sites. It was the largest mining field in Norway and the largest pre-industrial workplace in the country, employing over 4,000 people at its peak in the 1770s. Across its life it consumed more than 450,000 man-years and produced over 1.3 million kilograms of silver, supplying more than a tenth of the gross national product of the Danish-Norwegian union.

The find is dated tightly, to somewhere between 1 and 5 July 1623. The version usually told, and it is a romantic one, has two children named Helga and Jacob out shepherding cattle on top of Gruveasen hill. Their ox scraped the side of the mountain, something glittered, and they carried it home to their father. He knew silver when he saw it, melted it down and took it to Skien in Telemark to sell. There he was arrested, because the price he was asking was so low that the police assumed he had stolen it. Given the choice between naming the place and hard labour, he named Southern Sandsvaer, the old name for Kongsberg.

None of which was quite the beginning. Jacob Ziegler's 1532 book on Scandinavia already called the workings at Gruveasen the Argenti Fodinae, the silver mines, and Christian III started a proper venture there in 1539 with German miners brought in for the purpose. It shut in the early 1540s when silver flooding out of Spanish Latin America collapsed the price.

Go and see it. The Norsk Bergverksmuseum, founded in 1938 and open to the public since 1945, occupies part of the silver works' old smelting house on the Lagen and traces the technical story from 1623 to 1958, with material from the Royal Mint alongside it. The old mines at Saggrenda belong to the museum and open in summer, reached by the mine railway: the train runs 2,300 metres into Kongens gruve, the King's Mine, and 342 metres below the surface.