The Nokia House, Nokia's head office located by the Gulf of Finland in Keilaniemi, Espoo, was constructed between 1995 and 1997. It is the workplace of more than 1,000 Nokia employees.Pre-telecommunications era
The predecessors of the modern Nokia were the Nokia Company (Nokia Aktiebolag), Finnish Rubber Works Ltd (Suomen Gummitehdas Oy) and Finnish Cable Works Ltd (Suomen Kaapelitehdas Oy).
Nokia's history starts in 1865 when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a groundwood pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski rapids in the town of Tampere, in southwestern Finland, and started manufacturing paper. In 1868, Idestam built a second mill near the town of Nokia, fifteen kilometres (nine miles) west of Tampere by the Nokianvirta river, which had better resources for hydropower production. In 1871, Idestam, with the help of his close friend statesman Leo Mechelin, renamed and transformed his firm into a share company, thereby founding the Nokia Company, the name it is still known by today.
The name of the town, Nokia, originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river itself, Nokianvirta, was named after the archaic Finnish word originally meaning a small, dark-furred animal that lived on the banks of the Nokianvirta river. In modern Finnish, noki means soot and nokia is its inflected plural, although this form of the word is rarely if ever used. The old word, nois (pl. nokia) or nokinäätä ("soot marten"), meant sable. After sable was hunted to extinction in Finland, the word was applied to any dark-furred animal of the genus Martes, such as the pine marten, which are found in the area to this day.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Mechelin's wishes to expand into the electricity business were at first thwarted by Idestam's opposition. However, Idestam's retirement from the management of the company in 1896 allowed Mechelin to become the company's chairman (from 1898 until 1914) and sell most shareholders on his plans, thus realizing his vision. In 1902, Nokia added electricity generation to its business activities.
Industrial conglomerate
In 1898, Eduard Polón founded Finnish Rubber Works, manufacturer of galoshes and other rubber products, which later became Nokia's rubber business. At the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish Rubber Works established its factories near the town of Nokia and began using Nokia as its product brand. In 1912, Arvid Wickström founded Finnish Cable Works, producer of telephone, telegraph and electrical cables and the foundation of Nokia's cable and electronics businesses.At the end of the 1910s, shortly after World War I, the Nokia Company was nearing bankruptcy. To ensure the continuation of electricity supply from Nokia's generators, Finnish Rubber Works acquired the business of the insolvent company. In 1922, Finnish Rubber Works acquired Finnish Cable Works. In 1937, Verner Weckman, a sport wrestler and Finland's first Olympic Gold medalist, became President of Finnish Cable Works, after 16 years as its Technical Director. After World War II, Finnish Cable Works supplied cables to the Soviet Union as part of Finland's war reparations. This gave the company a good foothold for later trade.
The three companies, which had been jointly owned since 1922, were merged to form a new industrial conglomerate, Nokia Corporation in 1967 and paved the way for Nokia's future as a global corporation. The new company was involved in many industries, producing at one time or another paper products, car and bicycle tires, footwear (including Wellington boots), communications cables, televisions and other consumer electronics, personal computers, electricity generation machinery, robotics, capacitors, military communications and equipment (such as the SANLA M/90 device and the M61 gas mask for the Finnish Army), plastics, aluminium and chemicals.[24] Each business unit had its own director who reported to the first Nokia Corporation President, Björn Westerlund. As the president of the Finnish Cable Works, he had been responsible for setting up the company’s first electronics department in 1960, sowing the seeds of Nokia’s future in telecommunications.
Eventually, the company decided to leave consumer electronics behind in the 1990s and focused solely on the fastest growing segments in telecommunications. Nokian Tyres, manufacturer of tyres split from Nokia Corporation to form its own company in 1988 and two years later Nokian Footwear, manufacturer of rubber boots, was founded. During the rest of the 1990s, Nokia divested itself of all of its non-telecommunications businesses.
Telecommunications era
The seeds of the current incarnation of Nokia were planted with the founding of the electronics section of the cable division in 1960 and the production of its first electronic device in 1962: a pulse analyzer designed for use in nuclear power plants.In the 1967 fusion, that section was separated into its own division, and began manufacturing telecommunications equipment.
