Biography|Gosta Malm — Site Chief When the King Opened Norsborg Works

Stockholm's new waterworks was not bought off a catalogue.

The city purchased the Bornsjö estates in 1899 and decided to design and build the plant itself.

Fredrik Vilhelm Hansen ran the waterworks.

Gösta Malm, still in his late twenties, was made site chief.

Svenskt biografiskt lexikon dates that posting from 1899 to 1905.

The Norsborg article is blunt about the gap he had to close: KTH taught almost no waterworks practice, and Swedish handbooks barely existed, so the young civilingenjör read German and French journals on the job.

The brick pump hall at the gate still reads like a basilica with a campanile.

One of the 1904 steam pumps, built on a Berlin licence by Nydqvist & Holm in Trollhättan, remains on its original bed.

Västra verket went into service in 1904.

On 6 October that year Oscar II came out to the works.

The visit is the public date on a job that had already eaten five years of Malm's life.

From here a 40-inch main was laid toward the city along the Södertälje road.

The plant is still Stockholm's largest drinking-water works.

The buildings Malm's crew raised are the ones a visitor photographs first.

Photo: Holger Ellgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Norsborg maskinhall)