The Origins of Nokia

pronouncing this company. I've definitely heard Nokia a lot more frequently than Nokia, and I've heard Nokia. I've heard lots of different variations. It seems that no matter which one I pick, I'm wrong. I'm just accepting that. So I'm gonna go with Nakia, knowing that I'm wrong. So I've saved you the trouble of writing in You're welcome. Now, before I jump into the story of Nakia, I want to get you guys a little bit of an anecdote.

My memory is not the best. Anyone who knows me knows that's an understatement, but as best I can tell, my first cell phone was a Knockia twenty one. That model came out in two thousand three. Now it's possible that I had a Knackia eighty two ten. That one came out in nine That was the really colorful one. You could actually pop the covers off and replace it

with other covers. They had I think six different colors when it first came out, and then there were a bunch of third party ones that other ones with crazy designs, But I honestly cannot remember. So it's possible that I just saw the Nakia eighty two tens everywhere, but I didn't actually own one. Cell Phones had been around in the general consumer population for a few years before I

ever got ahold of one. I remember there were classmates of mine in college who had cell phones, and I kept on thinking, why the heck would I want people to be able to reach me whenever and wherever I was. And it took me a few years to break down and get one. And of course now I have separation anxiety if I am not constantly in close proximity to my cell phone. But I never once thought to look

into the company that made my first cell phone. I just assumed it was a Japanese company out of Sheer ignorance. I thought, oh, it's no Kia. That sounds like it could be a company from Japan, I suppose, And I never really thought anything more of it, which was ridiculous, of course, and again it was due to my own ignorance. So I did find out eventually that it was a

company in Finland many years later. In fact, it might have been after I had started working here and how stuff works, which was back in two thousand and eight, so quite late in the game as it were. I just wasn't really paying attention to mobile handset news, and until I did the research for the show, I had just assumed that Nakia was a relatively young company, perhaps with a background that stretched back maybe to the late eighties maybe mid eight knees and started in electronics, then

work their way to cellular phones. But I was so incredibly wrong. And this, my friends, is the biggest reason that I love my job. I get to learn stuff and push back my own ignorance, which is exciting to me, to actually learn new things, and then to share what I've learned. Though I'm sure a lot of you will be familiar with elements of this story that I'm going to tell today, but maybe some of it will come as a surprise to you as well, and I hope

you also take delight in that. So our story begins in eighteen thirty eight Finland with an engineer named Newt Frederick Edmund, later known as Frederick Idistan. And I know also I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of these Finnish names, and I apologize profusely for that. Uh Is Stem actually took his the last name of his uncle who adopted him. Now, I'm not about to tell you that a Finish in ter created the cell phone in the mid nineteenth century

in Finland. That would be ridiculous because who would he call. But it Is Stem would become the founder of the company that evolved into Nokia. It Is Stem followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a mining engineer, and he earned a master's degree in engineering and had planned on applying for employment with the Board of Minds of the Grand Duchy of Finland as a civil servant.

Quick history lesson. At this time, Finland was technically part of the Russian Empire, but it was semi autonomous and got to operate as what was called the Grand Duchy of Finland before that it had been part of Sweden. So the geography and political nature will play into this story quite a bit as well. So it's it's good

to have that that basic understanding. While Frederick was pursuing more education in the field of metal or in Germany, while attending the School of Minds in Friedburg, Saxony, he went on a little field trip and he visited what was called a groundwood mill, which took wood and turned it into the raw materials for paper. So, first of all, cool, and second of all, yeah, I get to talk about

paper mills. Now that might sound weird that I'm actually excited to talk about paper mills, but here's the thing. I grew up around paper mills when I was a little kid, and the smell is memorable because paper mills these days typically use a chemical treatment on the wood pulp to turn it into paper. Uh. I should also mention that I grew up also around poultry farms, and the mixture of smells when the wind blew just right of poultry farms and paper mills meant that I had

a tough childhood. Guys, at least as far as the old factory system is concerned. Anyway, the paper mill. It is them that did was built to take advantage of the work of two innovators, Friedrich gottlub Killer and Heinrich Filter. Keller had received a pattern in eighteen forty six for his method of making paper from wood fiber mash, and Filter developed this approach to make mass production of paper a possibility. Until then, paper had been made from rags

pretty much by hand. And this type of paper, sometimes called cotton paper, has some nice features to it that makes its superior in many ways to wood pulp paper. For example, it takes ink really well and it's far more durable than well woodpulpa based paper. But it was a laborious process and it was hard to make a lot of it in a short amount of time. So here's how the old style paper was made, because I think this is fascinating, and to be fair, there's still

paper that's made this way. First, you would take some rags, perhaps from clothing that had been worn out during usefulness, usually made from something like linen. Later on cotton became popular, but before the the shipments came back from the New World with cotton, linen was the primary type of textile material during medieval times, you would actually have a guy who would go around essentially door to door, collecting old linen clothing from people after the clothing had been worn out.

He was also typically the same guy who would collect bones, usually animal bones, to be ground down for fertilizer, and that local dude became known as the rag and bone man. So if you've heard the phrase rag and bone man, that's where it comes from. You're only human, after all, don't put the blame on me. The linen was prime material for paper pulp. You just had to prepare it first, so workers at the paper mill would use a knife

to tear the linen clothing into smaller strips. They would dunk those strips into a vat filled with water and let it soak for a couple of days, and after that they would take the soggy mess and lay it in a trough. Now in Germany, it became common practice to use huge, heavy wooden hammers that were driven by a water wheel device to just lift up and smash down over and over again, smashing the soggy mess until

it becomes pulp. At that point, you would transfer the pulp into a vat and workers would dip a frame with parallel wires, kind of a sieve strung across this uh this frame, and they would gather up pulp and they would pour out any excess pulp, and they would make sure they had a nice, relatively flat layer of pulp. They'd swished the frames around a bit, and they would gently lay out a sheet of soggy wet paper against a layer of cloth, and then they would cover it

up with another layer of cloth. They would repeat the process, having kind of a sandwich of cloth and paper this way. I watched the video of a man in India who uses this old method all by hands, swishing the pulp in the frame, almost like he was inning for gold. It's what it reminded me of. So what's happening on a microscopic basis, Well, imagine pulp as a huge mass of tiny strings, and this is true for pulp from

rags or from wood. Processing pulp makes the strings hairy, meaning it a braids the edges it created, makes them uneven. That encourages the various fibers to bind together. And it's that binding process that creates sheets of paper. Now let's go back to the medieval paper mill. Now, eventually they would move a pile of these soggy sheets that were pressed between layers of cloth over to a press machine.

So you've got a flat press and a screw top, and by turning the screw top, it brings the press down and squeezes everything underneath it right well, in this case, they would use it to squeeze most of the water out of the sheets of paper, and then they would hang up the sheets of paper to dry out the rest of the way. The parallel wires of the frames would create create a ribbed pattern on the paper, and

that type of paper became known as laid paper. By the time Frederick it Istan was visiting a paper mill, a new type of paper was beginning to emerge. The paper makers started using what they called a wove mold, meaning the frames they were using actually had a tightly woven sieve of wires that criss crossed each other in a grid rather than just parallel. That created a paper that was easier to write on it made it more legible,

is considered superior to the laid paper approach. In the seventeenth century, in Holland, engineers created a device casually called a hollander that made this process a little easier. It had a tub that you would fill with rags and water, and you would use a set of rotating blades connected to some form of gear work that would harness a natural source of power. So you might have a windmill and you're harnessing wind power, or you might have a

water wheel and you're harnessing water power. This sped things up a bit, but everyone was still using rags to create paper at that time. The wood pulp advancements that Keller and Filter created change things significantly, and in a moment will explore how a wood pulp paper mill worked back in the nineteenth century. But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So how does a wood pulp paper mill work. The earliest wood pulp

mills used mechanical force to turn wood into pulp. So you would chop down trees. Then you would cut the trees up into small logs called bolts. The bolts would go through grinders made out of stone, typically sandstone, and you would use some form of of power to turn

these grinders. You would typically have a water wheel, or maybe you would use human or animal power, but more frequently than not, you would use water wheels, just because you needed that that hydro power to really turn these massive stones, and the grinders would crush the bolts into pulp, which would be soaked and then poured into the paper

molds to form sheets of paper. Wood pulp paper was less durable than rag paper, and it didn't take ink quite as well, so before paper makers learned how to treat the wood with various chemicals to improve the quality of paper, it was pretty brittle and had a tendency to turn yellow after just a couple of days, but did lend itself to mass manufacture in a way that rag paper didn't, and it was relatively cheap to produce, so while it was arguably an inferior paper, it was

easier to produce in the quantities that were in demand. This was also a time in history when literacy was on the rise. The Industrial Revolution was giving people an opportunity to have more time to themselves, which they filled with various activities such as reading. Frederick took this newfound knowledge of paper mills back to his homeland of Finland. Finland seemed like the perfect place to establish a wood

pulp paper mill. The country had enormous forests, and no shortage of fast flowing rivers, so locating a mill along the river to use the water as a power source and harvesting the lumber from the vast forests seemed like a perfect opportunity. Frederick ordered machines from Germany designed by Felter himself, to install such a paper mill in his

home country. The applied for a permit to operate such a business, and the Finish Senate approved the permit on May twelfth, eighteen sixty five, and Nokia traces back their history to that very day. The mill took time to build and bring up to operational status, but it began producing paper commercially in eighteen sixty six. Frederick located his first mill in Tampere, near the Tamarkowski Rapids, and his venture succeeded where other entrepreneurs in Finland had failed. Felters

technology was proven to be effective. Now Frederick had to devote as much energy to promoting paper as he did in bringing the technology to Finland. The general consensus was that would pulp paper just wasn't very good, but Frederick kept at it and experimented with papers made from a collection of rag and wood pulp fibers, so he started combining the two. In eighteen sixty seven, at the Paris Exhibition,

he brought home the bronze medal. After demonstrating his groundwood pulp Felter's mill received a gold medal, so this was seen as an endorsement that helped propel would pulp paper into common use. In eighteen sixty eight, Frederick built a second paper mill. This time he chose a location called Nakia, which was built along a river called Nakia, and that river provided a much better source of hydro power. It

was just a stronger flowing river. So he formed a partnership with his friend Leo Michelin or sometimes Leo Mechelein to create a shared company and they called it Nokia AB or ab a b is what that stands for anyway, This was the birth of the Nokia name. Leo Michelin, by the way, was a remarkable man in his own right.

He earned degrees in literature, esthetics, and jurisprudence, so he had the opportunity to become a lawyer, but instead became a professor and he continued studies in economics at the same time. He also later became a member of Parliament for the Swedish People's Party and was known as a liberal reformer who worked hard to create a strong Finnish economy.

When Russia began to put the screws to the Grand Duchy of Finland, which again was technically part of the Russian Empire at that time, Michelin advocated passive resistance as a means to protest Russia's policies. Quake historic note here Finland again was originally part of Sweden. In the early eighteen hundreds, during the Finnish War, Russian Russian forces rested Finland away from Sweden. Incorporated into the Russian Empire, Finland was able to maintain a good, good deal of a nomy,

unlike a lot of Russian territories. And now back to Michelin. He was exiled for his actions for recommending this passive resistance, and he was later allowed back in because he was actually voted into parliament. So once he was voted in as a member of parliament, the country said, well, I guess we can't really keep you banished. You represent the people,

so come on back. In eighteen seventy one, Frederick and Michelin transformed Nakia ab into Nakia Limited, creating a share company, and as the name implies, this is a company in which investors purchase shares or a percentage of the ownership of the company. Essentially, Nachia was becoming a publicly traded company, though in those early days it wasn't on a public stock exchange. Michelin purchased an estate called Nakia Manner, which included property along the Nakia Rapids, and all of those

assets became part of Nakia Limited. So while Michelin made the purchases, he ended up incorporating that as part of the company, and they started having their headquarters in this manor house, and the waterfalls that were adjacent to the manor house were considered part of their property. They actually owned the waterfall. In eight five, the company built the first sulfite pulp mill in Finland. This took a different approach than the mechanical mills that had used physical force

to break down the wood into pulp. Now there was a chemical process in the mix. So let me explain that first you need sulfurus acid, not sulfuric, but sulfur us. The mill could produce this by taking sulfur and burning it with just the right amount of oxygen, which would create create sulfur dioxide. They would then use water to absorb the sulfur dioxide, which creates sulfurus acid. Then you add in some carbonates or hydroxides as counter ions, and

you pour this pulping liquid into a bowl. Boiler. Now, double boiler is a device in which you have one container located inside a second container, and around that that first container, the inner one, you have water. So you've got second container, you've got water. Then you have the first container inside all of that, and you heat up the second container so that it boils the water and

that in turn heats up the first container. And double boilers are common for lots of different things, including cooking. You may have created a double boiler, especially if you were working with something like trying to melt chocolate. Well, you would mix in wood pulp and allow the wood pulp and this mixture, the sulfurous acid mixture to mush together.

The the actual device that this stuff was in. We're called digesters, so you can think of it as digesting this wood pulp for several hours at high temperatures, typically somewhere between a hundred thirty and a hundred six degrees celsius or between two sixty six to three twenty degrees fahrenheit. The pulping liquid extracts a material called lignant from the wood. This is something that provides structural support in the cells

inside wood pulp. After its time in the digesters, the treated pulp would be washed to remove the chemicals and the degraded lignant that was leached from this stuff, and the pulp could then be used to create paper or combined with other pulps and then used to create paper. The paper business was progressing well and Michelin began to urge Frederick that the company should diversify and get into

other businesses. He was specifically thinking about creating an electricity power plant because they were right next to this river, they said. He said, this is perfect. We can use the river to help turn a generator and generate electricity. But Frederick was not on the same page. That's a paper putt, and he refused, so he said not as

long as I'm alive now. He ended up retiring in eighteen ninety six and Michelin would assume the role of Nakia ABS chairman and he began laying the groundwork for building out an electricity plant which was ready to go in nineteen o two. All right, so we're in the home stretch for the origin of Nakia to talk a little bit more about what happened in those early days. But before I jump into this last segment, let's take

a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now we need to switch gears a bit and talk about another Finnish entrepreneur and the business he founded. The businessman's name was Edward Polonne. He was the son of a police chief. He had earned himself a law degree, and he worked as a lawyer and a civil servant in Finland's prison administration. That's fun. Edward joined several other business owners to create a new company that was called the Finish Rubber Works Limited.

Actually has a much longer name and Finish that I cannot possibly pronounce, so I'm not even going to try it,

but in English Finnish Rubber Works Limited. And someday I'll have to do a full episode about the role that rubber played in industrialization and how it's discovery led to massive trauma in the Amazon, both for indigenous people's in fact, mainly for them who called the area of their home and to the Europeans who were seeking out a way to make a fortune, thousands of whom died in the process.

But we'll sum it up here to say that in the late nineteenth century, rubber was in demand and it was being used for many different things, including waterproof boots. Galoshes became the Finnish rubber company's chief product, something that Nokia still makes to this day. In nineteen four the company relocated its headquarters from Helsinki to the town of Nokia. The move was necessary in order to grow as a company.

There just wasn't much room min Helsinki for the expansion, and Nokia had a ready workforce and the river was a steady source of hydro power. Also, the electricity generator from Nokia AB was a great resource. So why do I bring that up. It's because in nineteen eighteen, this rubber company acquired Nokia Limited, largely in order to get access to that hydro power that Nakia had at its disposal.

Though these two companies would operate independently because at the time it was actually against the law for companies in different industries to merge together in Finland, so they could not operate as a single entity. Because it was illegal to do so. While the Rubber Company was growing and the Nokia paper and electricity businesses were doing well, another company was establishing itself in Finland, and that was a

venture that was called the Finnish Cable Company. Again, the actual Finnish names are really long, and I would just butcher them if I attempted them. But it's the Finnish Cable Company and it was founded by Avid Wickstrom. His company produced telephone, telegraph and electrical cables. Cologne would lead an acquisition of that company in nineteen twenty two, bringing it under this conglomerate. So now you had three companies.

You had the Rubber Company, you had the Finished Cable Company, and you had Nokia AB And he still had to run all three businesses independently of one another, though they were in this kind of conglomerate. Edward was the majority shareholder. The main businesses now were electricity generation, cable production, rubber manufacturing, and paper slash forestry goods. Pologne became the head of

this new conglomerate and he led the way. Nine two would end up being a big year for lots of reasons, not just because this conglomerate formed That was also the year that Joseph Stalin established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, also known as the Soviet Union or U s s R. Finland had previously declared its independence from the Russian Empire back in nineteen seventeen after the Grand Duke Nicholas the Second abdicate at his authority as Emperor, ending the empirical

rule of Russia. So you had the Emperor say all right, I'm out. You had Finland say all right. Then that means we're independent. Now you can't do anything about it, and Russia or Imperial Russia at that point that's crumbling around it said, you know, we've got bigger problems to worry about that in Finland. Now. I mentioned this because the Soviet Union would become one of Nokia's big customers after what could generously be described as an adversarial relationship

with Finland. And now we have to jump into some World War two history to really understand how complicated this gets. On November thirtieth, nineteen thirty nine, the Soviet Union launched an attack on Finland with the intent to annex Finland back into the Soviet Union, thus negating Finland's declaration of

independence in nineteen seventeen. The Finnish people had up to that point been divided about the conflict in Europe, whether some wanted to side with the Allies some of the access powers, but this attack managed to unify the country against the U. S. S R, which was part of the Allied forces. Now they weren't against all the Allies at this point, just against the U. S. S R. But finished resistance would end up being fierce, but the Soviets vastly outnumbered the Finns, and in nineteen forty the

Finnish government had to sign a peace treaty. They ended up seeding much of Finland to the Soviet Union. This was later called the Winter War. Finland would try to seek out help as the Soviets continued to place pressure on the country, and they asked the Allies. They said, could you guys help? Sweden and Britain both said, hey, we really feel for you, but we've got our own stuff going on, and eventually they turned to Germany instead.

Germany was of course eager to have a foothold from which it could launch an invasion into the Soviet Union, and so Finland would find itself allied with the Nazi Germany Powers and access Powers, and this began what was called the Continuation War in nineteen forty one. Finland was intent on retaking the lands it had lost at the end of the Winter War, and the conflict would stretch

on until nineteen forty four. It went back and forth a few times UH and at that point there was an uneasy peace that was arrived at between the Soviet Union and Finland, and not much had changed territorially speaking from the end of the Winter War. Essentially we were back to where things were at the beginning of the conflict. In the fall of nineteen forty four, Finland turned against

Germany and began fighting in the Lapland War. After the Soviet Union applied political and military pressure as codified in the Moscow Armistist So Finland was being told by the Soviet Union, you need to uh, you need to put up resistance against Germany. You need to kick out German troops from your country. You need to actually go on the offensive. You need to declare war against Germany. Finland

wasn't really keen on this. The leader of Finland at the time was sort of sympathetic to Germany, and there was a reluctance to engage in warfare against a country that had previously been its ally. At the same time, the Soviet Union was saying, if you want this piece to hold, you will do what we say, and we outnumber you, so maybe you should start acting on that. So Finland officially began attacking German forces on September in the wake of the war. Once World War Two was over,

Finland was forced to pay reparations to the Soviet Union. Essentially, the Allies said, your actions during the war put you more on the Axis side than the Allied side, and you owe the Soviet Union for all the different attacks you did. Even though the Soviet Union technically attacked Finland first, not all of Finland was suffering due to this relationship with the Soviet Union. For example, Nakia, Nakia's electricity generating

business ended up doing quite well. The Soviet Union became one of Nakia's biggest customers, in fact, their primary customer. The Soviet Union would purchase electrical equipment, cables, manufacturing, machinery and more from Nakias. Nakia began to offer up more products, the Soviet Union began to purchase them that allowed Nakia to grow rapidly and expand, and that allowed them to

pursue a new market, which was electronics. In nineteen sixty three, Nakia starts making radio telephones, mostly for the Finnish military, some for the Soviet military and for first responders. This would be the uh the still the conglomerate, right, there's not a company yet, it's a conglomerate of companies to dip its toe the first time that they would dip their toe in an industry that would later define the company.

So in nineteen sixty seven, more than one hundred years after Frederick established his first paper mill, the three companies within the Nokia conglomerate formally merged together to create the Nakia Corporation. The company's businesses included electronics, rubber, cable, and lumber. It was poised to pursue opportunities in several spaces, including consumer electronics, and yet there was still no hint that this company would become a major player in the futuristic

technology of portable cellular phones. Now, in the next episode, we're gonna pick up with the Nachia Corporation and talk about how it forged a pathway in electronics in general and cell phones in particular. Will also look at how the company ultimately made the decision to divest itself of nearly all of its businesses, including ultimately its mobile device division, which one could argue was the division that gave the

company its global reach in the nineteen nineties. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's at technology, a company, personality, and tech. Maybe there's someone you would like to have on the show as a co host or someone I should interview, Please write me and let me know your thoughts. The address for this show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on

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of producers. SAR is like the fifth one. I see how lasts, and I'll talk to you again. Really sick for more on this and bouthands of other topics because it has to works dot com