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What did Nokia start out making in 1865?
The Finnish company later moved into rubber boots, cables and phones.
Nokia's own history places the company's founding in Tampere in 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam set up a groundwood pulp mill to make paper. A few years later he opened a second mill beside the Nokianvirta river, and the firm took its name from that river and the nearby town of Nokia, in Finland. The company thus began as a paper-and-pulp business and not a technology firm.
The modern company grew through mergers. The Finnish Rubber Works was founded in Helsinki in 1898 and sold products such as the Nokia galoshes and tyres shown in the company's archive photographs. In the 1960s, the rubber, cable and other businesses were joined into a single group, and the electronics arm became active in radio telephones by 1967. Nokia's captions in its media library show car phones from the Mobira brand in the early 1980s.
Mobile handsets arrived with the Nokia 1011 in 1992 and the Nokia 2110 in 1994, and the company became the world's largest handset maker in the late 1990s. It later sold its handset business to Microsoft in 2014, and today concentrates on network equipment. Because Nokia has been through several mergers, it is more accurate to say the corporate lineage traces to 1865 than that the same business ran continuously.