In the 19th century there was a factory called Vieille-Montagne, located in the centre of the Saint-Léonard neighbourhood. This was where the zinc industry in the area began. Today the site is mostly fallen into disrepair; its history is symbolic in many ways. The company was the first multinational in Europe. Vieille-Montagne also produced a number of forms of industrial pollution that were later held to be nuisances and that gave rise to disputes and litigation. Arnaud Péters, a researcher at the Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques in Liège, analyes the strategies used by this Liège foundry in order to get people to accept its polluting fumes. He also examines the factors that in 1880 caused the closing of the historic factory, the most important facility in the Belgian zinc industry at that time.
The company Vielle-Montagne, including zinc mines, a foundry and a factory at Saint-Léonard, was an emblematic part of Liège’s industrial past. However, it had been nearly forgotten, until a young researcher from the University of Liège took an interest in it. When Arnaud Péters arrived at the university in 2007, his dissertation project was already well underway. It concerned the history of the Belgian system of patents in the 19th century. In 2007, however, Robert Halleux, Director of the Centre d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (C.H.S.T.), suggested that he include an investigation of the archives of the Vielle-Montagne company in his doctoral work. The archives contained a striking example of technology from a previous era that had been avant-garde in its days, and provided material for the analysis of many technical innovations invented or discovered during the 19th century.
After immersing himself in some 700 meters of archive material (in terms of shelf space), including some of the most interesting parts from the standpoint of the history of technology, Péters decided to move beyond the initial focus on innovation in the zinc industry, adding a consideration of technical problems and their solutions, with special focus on industrial nuisances, involving pollution and harm to the environment. Little by little he built up a case study that was originally supposed to be a complement to his dissertation. It ended up becoming the central part.
![zinc factory 1855]( "zinc factory 1855.")
In the effort to analyze these industrial pollutants and the techniques developed to reduce them, Péters benefited from extensive field experience. The research he had already carried out for his dissertation was helpful for his work for CHST. CHST has an interdisciplinary team, and a department focusing on abandoned industrial sites, studying them in order to draw up a map of dangerous areas, then figuring out ways to clean them up as effectively as possible. A second focus of the unit’s research involves the compilation, on the basis of a group of historical sources, of inventories of potentially polluted soils, intended to help soil management efforts.
In the framework of his participation in a research program concerning “Débordements industriels dans la Cité” organized by the Conservatoire national des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Arnaud Péters is particularly interested in the question of nuisances caused by the Saint-Léonard foundry. In order to understand the reasons why this foundry was located in the center of Liège, it is necessary to return to the time before its construction, to the time of a revolutionary invention by Jean-Jacques Dony.
