# Goethe’s mining commission restarts the Ilmenau silver-copper works

Date: 1784

## The fact

In 1784 the Ilmenau mines, under a commission in which [Goethe](/people/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe) was the driving councillor, were restarted as a ducal extractive enterprise. The works later flooded and failed.

## Context

Ducal mines promised revenue and required labour and capital from a small poor territory. Failure in 1796 did not rebate the extraction. Goethe’s geological curiosity is a separate knowledge path if dated.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official archive/museum/agency pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Klassik Stiftung Weimar — Goethe institutions (https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/; Klassik Stiftung Weimar).

## Significance

Extractive restart is an inequality path. A later museum of mining is not a rebate.

Extractive restart is an inequality path. A later museum of mining is not a rebate.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [income-inequality](/drivers/income-inequality). The welfare reading used in this dossier is worsening. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: https://factrail.ai/people/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe

## Drivers

- Income Inequality: https://factrail.ai/drivers/income-inequality

## Sources

- https://doi.org/10.1017/ccol0521662117
- https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/go-ilmenau-mines-1784