Qualla: Salo

Salo: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleksander Krölov, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1928, two men named F. A. Nordell and Lauri Koskinen started an electronics workshop in a small Southwest Finnish market town and called it Salora: the name of the town, plus radio. Fusing your address to your product is a confident thing to do, and for the better part of a century it held. Salo built radios, then televisions, then the object that briefly made Finland synonymous with modernity. The town's fortunes and its factory's fortunes became the same sentence. That turned out to cut both ways.

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Image: Aleksander Krölov | CC BY-SA 3.0

Salo: Radio, Then Colour

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Migro, CC0. Salora grew into one of Finland's serious consumer-electronics firms. FM radios arrived in 1953, black-and-white television production in 1957, hi-fi systems a decade later. The company's showpiece was the Salora Finlandia colour television of 1968, which took a gold medal at the...

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Image: Migro | CC0

Salo: Mobira

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ypsilon from Finland, CC0. In 1979 Salora and Nokia formed a joint venture, Mobira, to build handsets for the Nordic Mobile Telephone network, the automatic cellular system that opened across the Nordic countries in 1981 and let a phone cross a border without losing its call. Nokia bought out Mobira in 198...

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Image: Ypsilon from Finland | CC0

Salo: The Year the Numbers Turned

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leo-setä, CC BY 2.0. In 2010 Nokia accounted for 95 per cent of Salo's corporate tax income — about 60 million euros. Two years later that figure was 14 million. The collapse was as fast as the boom had been: facing heavy losses in 2012, Nokia laid off a third of its 3,500-strong Salo workforce and m...

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Image: Leo-setä | CC BY 2.0

Salo: What a Town Does Next

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vnnen, CC BY-SA 3.0. What Salo had left after 2015 was not nothing: buildings, infrastructure, and several thousand people who knew how to run a precision production line. Those assets pulled in other companies, and the town has kept going without pretending the old scale will return. Its population ...

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Image: Vnnen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Salo: Pumpkins and a President

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Motopark, Public domain. The event that now draws crowds to Salo has nothing to do with technology. Each autumn the Kurpitsaviikot — Pumpkin Weeks — fill a field at Halikko with thousands of pumpkins and carved lanterns glowing through the long Finnish dusk. It began small and got completely out of hand,...

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Image: Motopark | Public domain