Chemical Element: nickel
(German: Nickel, name for "Satan"; kupfernickel, meaning "Devil’s copper" or "St Nicholas’s (Old Nick’s) copper"; metal)
Chemical-Element Information
Symbol: NiAtomic number: 28
Year discovered: 1751
Discovered by: Baron Axel Fredrik Cronstedt (1722-1765), a Swedish mineralogist.
- Minerals containing nickel were of value for coloring glass green.
- The mineral used for coloring glass was called kupfernickel (false copper).
- Nickel was discovered by Baron Axel Frederik Cronstedt in a mineral called niccolite.
- Apparently, he had expected to extract copper from this mineral but he didn’t get any, obtaining instead a white metal that he called nickel after the mineral from which it was extracted.
- Cronstedt discovered that nickel, like iron but not as strongly, was attracted by a magnet.
- It was the first time that anything except iron had been found to be attracted by a magnet.
- In fact, magnets were eventually found to attract cobalt as well.
- An impure ore containing niccolite earlier than 1700 caused copper and silver miners in Saxony, Germany, considerable trouble because although it resembled copper in color, it yielded a brittle , unfamiliar product.
- They referred to it as “kupfernickel”, after “Old Nick” and his mischievous gnomes, and Cronstedt applied their name to his new element.
- His results were confirmed in 1775 by Torbern Olof Bergman (1735-1784), Swedish chemist and physicist, and the name nickel soon became generally accepted.
- About a century passed before nickel was mined in quantity for a growing world market.
Name in other languages:
French: nickel
German: Nickel
Italian: nichel
Spanish: niquel
Information about other elements may be seen at this Chemical Elements List.
A special unit about words that include chemo-, chem- may be seen here.