Blaafarveværket

Blaafarveværket was a mining and industrial company located at Åmot in Modum in Buskerud, Norway.

Blaafarveværke was founded by King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway in the 1770s. It became the largest industrial company of the country in the mid-19th century. The works mined cobalt ore and manufactured by smelting blue cobalt glass (smalt) and cobalt blue (cobalt aluminate) pigment. At the time, it employed more than 2,000 workers, and in its peak supplied 80 percent of the world market for cobalt pigments.

In 1823, the company was acquired by German banker Wilhelm Christian Benecke von Gröditzberg of Berlin and Norwegian industrialist Jacob Benjamin Wegner of Königsberg. Wegner also took over as director general, a position he held until 1849, and in his time instituted many important social reforms for the workers. In the 1840s saw the emergence of a synthetic color industry. It was found on a cheaper synthetic blue dye, Ultramarine, which began to outperform cobalt as color pigment. The production of pigment at the works ceased in 1857, but mining was kept up until 1893.