The Nokia company was started in 1871, when Finnish engineer and paper mill owner Fredrik Idestam decided to go into partnership with his friend, the Finnish statesman Leo Mechelin. The new company was named after the town of Nokia, the site of one of Idestams paper mills. They expanded into electricity generation in 1902, which quickly overtook paper as the core business.

But by the end of World War I, the Nokia company was on its knees, and was bought out by galoshes manufacturer Finnish Rubber Works. A few years later, the company also bought Finnish Cable Works, who made cables for the telecommunications and electricity supply industry. The three firms merged in 1967 to form the Nokia Corporation. Over the years, Nokia were concerned with making a large variety of products including rubber and paper products, aluminium, electricity generators, electronic components, cables, and consumer electronics amongst other things.

In 1990, in anticipation of the telecommunications boom that was to follow, they sold off or abandoned all their other interests in order to fund their burgeoning telecommunications business.

Nokias first electronic device was a pulse analyser for nuclear power plants. They pioneered VHF radio, in conjunction with a company called Salora Oy, and later gave Finland its first mobile phone network. The ARP radio telephone network was one of the first of its kind in the world, and was certainly the most successful of any of the early mobile networks.

Nokia made another telecommunications first in the late seventies, with the invention of the the first digital telephone switch, the Nokia DX200. They bought out Salora Oy in 1984 to form a new mobile telecoms division which was called Nokia-Mobira Oy, capitalising on their previous success with the ARP network. They released the first commercially available radio telephone that could be used outside of a car, the Mobira Talkman, that same year.

They also introduced one of the worlds first hand held phones, the Mobira Cityman 900, which despite costing more than a family saloon car, sold like hot cakes, paving the way for their current dominance of the cell phone industry. The Cityman got a big publicity boost in 1987, when the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was pictured using one to call his communications minister in Moscow from Helsinki, leading to the phone being nicknamed The Gorba.

Nokia-Mobira Oy changed their name to Nokia Mobile Phones in 1989, and went on to dominate the mobile phone market of the 1990s and 2000s. Almost incidentally, thanks to the massive popularity of their camera phones, Nokia is now the biggest camera manufacturer in the world, ahead of such established names as Nikon and Olympus.