Jacob Benjamin Wegner was a Prussian-born, Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 investor, industrialist, diplomat and landowner.

Biography

Jacob Benjamin Wegner was born in Königsberg

Königsberg

Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...

 in East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...

. He was from a shipping family. In 1821 he moved to Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 to take a position in trading house of Gebrüder Benecke.
In 1822, Wegner bought Modums Blaafarveværk

Blaafarveværket

Blaafarveværket in Modum, Norway, founded by King Christian VII of Denmark-Norway in the 1770s, became the largest industrial company of the country in the mid-19th century. The works mined cobalt ore and manufactured by smelting blue cobalt glass and cobalt blue pigment...

 together with an investment group. The prime investor was merchant banker, Wilhelm Christian Benecke (1779–1860), who was head of Gebrüder Benecke.

Modums Blaafarveværk became the world leading producer of cobalt

Cobalt

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. It is found naturally only in chemically combined form. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal....

 pigment. Wegner was Director General and co-owner of the Modums Blaafarveværk from 1823 to 1849. In 1849 Modums Blaafarveværket went bankrupt and came under new ownership.

Wegner was also general consul for the northern German cities of Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, Luebeck and Bremen

Bremen

The City Municipality of Bremen is a Hanseatic city in northwestern Germany. A commercial and industrial city with a major port on the river Weser, Bremen is part of the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan area . Bremen is the second most populous city in North Germany and tenth in Germany.Bremen is...

. In Norway he resided on the famous estate of Frogner Manor

Frogner Manor

Frogner Manor is located on a former estate in an area that became part of today's borough of Frogner in Oslo, Norway. The estate is now the site of Frognerparken...

 (Frogner Hovedgaard), where Frognerparken and the Vigeland Sculpture Park are found today.

Personal life

Wegner was married in 1828 with the Henriette Seyler, the daughter of one of the leading merchants in Hamburg. Wegner had three sons (Johann Ludwig, Bailiff) and two daughters (Sophie and Anna Henriette).

Other sources

• Steinsvik, Tone Sinding (2000) The Norwegian Cobalt Mines and the Cobalt Works (Stiftelsen Modums Blaafarvevaerk) ISBN 978-8290734225