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Hello and welcome to the Thale Ironworks Museum.

The museum was opened in 1986, exactly 300 years after a sheet metal works was first set up in Thale.

Over the centuries, five production areas relating to iron extraction and processing were established. Take a look at the five stainless steel panels on the wall, where we’ve outlined them:

The works produced steel and processed it into sheet steel in several rolling mills. Those manufacturing divisions are shown on panels one and two.

But what made the Thale site stand out, was the way the sheet metal produced here underwent further processing. For 160 years, from 1835 to 1995, the Metal Punching and Enamelling plant made products bearing the famous "Löwenemail", Lion Enamel, label. From 1900, the Container and Apparatus Construction division manufactured large tanks with enamel lining – for the chemical and food industries, for instance. Thale‘s Powder Metallurgy division was established in 1939. It made complicated moulded parts from iron powder. Most of the parts were supplied to car manufacturers.

Of the five former production areas in Thale, only two have survived.

If you’re wondering why that is, please turn around and look across the room, towards the entrance to the exhibition. Do you see the three posters? That’s our second stop.