Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage Site
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How it came to be
In the early 1900s Norway used cheap hydroelectric power from its mountains and waterfalls to industrialise. The scientist Kristian Birkeland and the industrialist Sam Eyde developed a way to make nitric oxide from the nitrogen in the air with an electric arc, opening the way to fertiliser on an industrial scale, and founded Norsk Hydro to put it to work.
The first plant was at Notodden, where Svælgfos I was for a time the second-largest hydroelectric station in the world after the Adams plant at Niagara Falls. Vemork at Rjukan, finished in 1911, became the largest. Rjukan and Notodden grew into company towns with workers' housing and social institutions, and the fertiliser travelled to the ports by railway and train ferry.
In 1927 Norsk Hydro switched to the Haber-Bosch process, developed in Germany. During the Second World War the hydrogen plant near Vemork, which produced heavy water used in atomic research, was sabotaged by Norwegian resistance fighters. The power stations, factories, towns and railways were inscribed in 2015.
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