Skip to main content

Nickel: The Devil and the details.



The word nickel derives from the German word Kupfernickel, which translates roughly as “Devil’s copper”.  It got that name because once in the Middle Ages, German miners found a large strike of what they thought was pure copper, but turned out to be more of a copper-nickel mixture.  This happens more frequently than you might think.  (Nickel deposits often seem more like silver, at first.)  Nickel wasn’t useless, and there was plenty of copper in the mixture, which made refining the two metals very difficult.  The extra work to make their strike economically viable reduced the value of their find, so the miners understandably cursed it, attributing the find to Nick, a mischievous sprite from German mining mythology: Nickel.  It’s from this association that in English, the Devil came to be sometimes known as Old Nick.

That old devil, Nickel (artist’s rendering—no photo available).

Refining copper and nickel is a lot easier with modern technology.  Nickel is used in a lot of alloys, and sometimes in its pure form.  In the United States, the silver half dime coin was discontinued in 1883 and replaced with a physically larger coin that was 75% copper and only 25% nickel, also worth five cents.  This new coin, despite being mostly copper, was dubbed the nickel.  The design of the coin has changed a few times since 1883, but its metallic composition has remained the same.  The Canadian five-cent piece came along later, and it was also called a nickel.  This made more sense, since the Canadian piece actually was 99% nickel.  It remained that way until 1981, when Canadian nickels adopted the same alloy of the US coin.  Canadian nickels today are mostly nickel-plated steel, but no one feels the need to change the name.

Comments

Philip said…

Kupfernickel does not translate as 'Devil's Copper'. It’s the original German name for Nickel and it literally translates to ‘Copper Nickel’.

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were