Object of the month: Smelting ladle

Smelting ladle

In the summer of 2002, outside the shed of Tor Harald Johansen in Kåfjord, his pigs were rummaging in the soil and unearthed a metal object – a ladle bowl. However, it is uncertain what it was actually used for, but in the museum collection it is registered as a smelting ladle. If this is correct, the ladle bowl may have been used for melting small quantities of copper during the operation of Kåfjord Copper Works. Industrial-scale smelting took place in a smelting hut.

During the works’ first ten years of operation, the copper was exported to Great Britain for further smelting, as they did not have their own smelting hut. Instead, the works invested considerable effort in cleaning and sorting the raw materials before shipment. But in 1836, a smelting hut was built in Kåfjord. This made the works more independent in the production process.

Leonie D’Aunet writes in her accounts from Kåfjord in 1838:

“For the copper ore to become pure, it must undergo seven different processes, but everything happens so quickly that it takes no more than two hours before the crushed ore is transformed into red copper ingots, which are then loaded aboard English ships.”

Written by Daria Polishchuk