Modum Municipality

The cobalt from these mines colored the blue of European glass and porcelain for a century.

Wilhelm von Haidinger named skutterudite in 1845 for the Skutterud mines at Modum in Buskerud, Norway, which fed the Blaafarveværket works, once the largest cobalt blue pigment producer in the world. The mines ran from 1778 until 1898. The type locality is Skutterud at Modum, not the unrelated village of Skotterud near the Swedish border in Eidskog.