Notodden

Notodden lies where the river Tinne runs out into Heddalsvatnet, at the top of the waterway that leads down to Skien and the sea. The town climbs in terraces up from the lake, with the old Hydro factory area between the centre and the water. The brick church from 1938 was a gift from Ole H. Holta, head of the Tinfos company, and has an altarpiece by Henrik Sørensen. Notodden has been the shopping and service town for Aust-Telemark for more than a hundred years. In summer the canal boat M/S Telemarken leaves from Notodden for Lunde on the Telemark Canal.

Local knowledge: the name comes from a cotter's farm on the point where the Tinne meets the lake. The first part is not, the Norwegian word for a seine net. In 1865 only about 350 people lived here. Then, on 13 February 1903, the engineer Sam Eyde met the physicist Kristian Birkeland at a dinner party. They got talking about making saltpetre with electricity, and Birkeland believed he could build an electric arc big enough to bind the nitrogen in the air. By May 1905 a test factory stood at Svelgfoss on the Tinne, Norsk Hydro was founded that December, and Notodden had the world's first commercial factory for artificial fertiliser. Svelgfoss power station, finished in 1907, was the largest in Europe. In ten years the place grew from about 1.000 to 5.000 people, and on 1 January 1913 it became a town of its own. Hydro soon moved most of its production elsewhere and left for good in 2001, and in 2015 the old factory park went on UNESCO's World Heritage List with Rjukan.

Born here: actress Sonja Wigert (1913–1980) grew up in Skien and made about 20 Swedish films, and during the war she worked as an agent for Swedish intelligence and helped expose two leading German spies in Sweden. Her story was told in the film Spionen in 2019.

Visiting: the pin points to the tourist information inside Bok & Blueshuset in Storgata, open all year. The house by the lake is also library, cinema and concert hall, and the office of Notodden Blues Festival. The festival started in 1988 and fills the town every summer at the start of August, and stars set into the pavement by the square carry names like B.B. King. On a rainy day, go to the old Tinfos paper mill by the river, where the museum Lysbuen, named after the electric arc, tells how Hydro started and shows Birkeland's electromagnetic cannon from 1901. An art museum shares the building. Just west of town, Heddal Stave Church is the largest stave church in Norway, rising from the flat valley floor near Heddalsvatnet.

Fact sheet

• People: 9.395 in Notodden, 13.389 in Notodden municipality
• County: Telemark
• Town since: 1913 (as a trading town)
• Typical industries: car sales and repair, education, with a campus of the University of South-Eastern Norway, shops, as the trade town for Aust-Telemark

Population on 1 January 2026, from Statistics Norway. Typical industries are the ones with a much bigger share of the jobs here than in Norway as a whole (Statistics Norway, 2025).