Nickel aka “Devil’s Copper” — How a Poisonous Ore Got Its Name

Nickel has one of the strangest origin stories on the periodic table.

Seriously.

Most people hear the word nickel and think of the five-cent coin. Maybe stainless steel. Maybe they vaguely remember that nickel causes skin reactions from cheap jewelry.

What they probably don’t know is that the name itself goes back to pissed-off European miners who thought an evil underground trickster was screwing with them.

They thought they had found copper.

It looked like copper.

They mined it like copper.

They hauled it out of the earth, put it into their furnaces, heated it up…and got no copper.

What they DID get included arsenic fumes.

Great trade.

The ore eventually became known as Kupfernickel.

Copper nickel.

Old Nick’s copper.

The Devil’s copper.

When I first started digging into the etymology during my nickel research, I thought this was going to be one of those funny little historical side notes you spend five minutes on and then move along.

Nope.

It became another rabbit hole.

In my reference sheet for Love Your Liver Livestream #248, I literally put the heading “Nickel - The ‘Devil’s Copper.’” The discussion of nickel’s bizarre etymology and “Devil’s Copper” history begins around 4:45 in my video below.

Then Joe (my awesome producer) put together the Nickel: The Trickster Metal research document, which starts with Kupfernickel — “Old Nick’s Copper” and follows the strange mining folklore around the metal from there.

I went back afterward and checked the chemistry and historical sources because I wanted to know how much of this was real etymology and how much was folklore that had grown with retelling.

The core story is real.

And it’s arguably weirder when you get the details right.

The ore that lied

In the 1600s, miners in German-speaking mining regions were encountering reddish, copper-looking ores that refused to behave like copper.

The U.S. Geological Survey gives a wonderfully concise version of the story. German miners called the troublesome material Kupfernickel, or:

“Old Nick’s copper.”

The mineral eventually turned out to be nickel arsenide, today called nickeline or niccolite. U.S. Geological Survey — historical summary of nickel

And the name goes back quite a ways. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica entry on niccolite notes that Kupfernickel:

“was used as early as 1694.”

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica — Niccolite

Now think about what the miners experienced.

This mineral has a pale copper-red color. So they weren’t hallucinating. It really does LOOK copper-ish.

But it isn’t copper.

Worse, niccolite is essentially NiAs — nickel arsenide.

An 1885 mineral catalogue from the Australian Museum described what happens when the mineral is heated under a blowpipe:

“white arsenical fumes having a garlic odour.”

Australian Museum historical mineral catalogue

Well, THAT sounds pleasant.

Imagine being a miner hundreds of years ago.

You’ve found what appears to be valuable copper ore. You go through all the miserable work of digging it out of the earth. You bring it back. You roast it.

No copper comes out.

Instead, you get arsenic fumes, sickness, and even death.

And remember: these guys didn’t have modern analytical chemistry. They couldn’t send the ore to a lab for ICP-MS and get a report back Tuesday afternoon.

They had color, weight, smell, fire, observation…and whether the stuff coming out of the furnace made people sick.

So they gave it a name that communicated what they thought had happened.

They had been tricked.

What did “Nickel” actually mean?

This is where the popular version gets simplified into:

Kupfernickel = Devil’s copper.

That description isn’t something I made up. The Royal Society of Chemistry itself describes Cronstedt’s ore as:

“kupfernickel – the Devil’s copper.”

Royal Society of Chemistry — Axel Cronstedt and nickel

But the linguistic history underneath it is a little richer.

Kupfer simply means copper.

Nickel, before it became the name of element 28, was associated with a goblin, rascal, fool, or troublesome spirit. Etymonline traces it through German Nickel, a pet form of Nikolaus, and gives the old ore name as literally:

“copper goblin.”

It also points out the relationship to English Old Nick, meaning the Devil. Etymonline — nickel

So I would describe the progression this way:

Nikolaus → Nick → troublesome Nickel/goblin figure → Old Nick/the Devil → Kupfernickel → nickel the element.

Not every step in that chain is equally certain historically, and the earliest Nickel usage can mean something closer to a fool or contemptible trickster rather than literally Satan.

But either way, this metal did NOT receive a noble name.

It was basically named after a troublemaker.

A deceiver.

A trickster.

Something that LOOKED valuable and then refused to give the miners what it seemed to promise.

That is where the “Trickster Metal” idea comes from.

The research document goes farther into possible connections involving Nix/Nixie water spirits, St. Nicholas traditions, alchemy, and later occult symbolism. Some of that gets speculative, sure. That said…

The Kupfernickel/mining-goblin/Old Nick story is solid.

The farther-out symbolism is interesting. It isn’t necessary to establish the history.

And then I found something else.

Nickel isn’t alone.

Its neighbor on the periodic table, cobalt, got saddled with basically the same kind of mining curse.

The Royal Society of Chemistry says cobalt comes from German Kobold:

“goblin, or trouble maker.”

German miners encountered ores that were difficult and dangerous to process, often because of associated arsenic. So they blamed the goblins.

Nickel and cobalt.

Right beside each other on the periodic table.

Both tangled historically with arsenical ores.

Both named out of Germanic mine-spirit folklore. Royal Society of Chemistry — Cobalt

Huh.

Then somebody actually found the metal

For centuries, the ore was the problem.

Then along came Swedish chemist and mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt.

In 1751, Cronstedt was investigating material from a mine at Los in Hälsingland, Sweden. Like the miners before him, he initially suspected copper.

Instead, he isolated something different.

A new metal.

The Royal Society of Chemistry describes Cronstedt’s isolated material as:

“hard and brittle”

and

“only feebly attracted by the magnet.”

Royal Society of Chemistry — history of nickel

Cronstedt announced the new metal and gave it the shortened name nickel, preserving the miners’ old name instead of inventing some nice dignified Greek or Latin one.

I love that.

The miners curse an ore because they think an underground trickster is deceiving them.

A chemist discovers that there really IS an entirely different metal hidden inside it.

And then science keeps the curse as the official name.

Element 28.

Ni.

Nickel.

There was still controversy, by the way. Other chemists initially argued that Cronstedt hadn’t really found a new element at all. They thought his “nickel” might just be some mixture of cobalt, arsenic, iron, and copper.

That wasn’t completely crazy. Those substances actually did occur around these ores.

It took additional work. In 1775, Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman produced purer nickel, helping confirm that Cronstedt really had identified a separate element. The RSC history specifically notes that this:

“confirmed its elemental nature.”

Royal Society of Chemistry — Nickel element history

The trickster was finally unmasked.

Chemically, anyway.

Humans had actually been using nickel without knowing it

Here’s another odd part.

1751 was the discovery of nickel as a distinct chemical element.

It wasn’t the beginning of humans using nickel.

Nickel-containing meteorites had been worked with much earlier because nickel naturally accompanies meteoritic iron. The Royal Society of Chemistry also notes that a Chinese zinc-nickel alloy called pai-t’ung, or “white copper,” was in use by around 200 BC.

So people could make objects containing nickel for centuries without knowing that nickel itself existed.

Again: very on-brand for the Trickster Metal.

It was hiding in alloys before chemistry had even given it a name. Royal Society of Chemistry — Nickel Periodic Table

But nickel still wasn’t yet the industrial monster it would become.

For quite a while, it was more of a metallurgical curiosity.

That started changing in the 1800s.

In 1820, Michael Faraday made an iron-nickel alloy while trying to reproduce the properties of meteoric iron. The USGS describes his product as:

“the forerunner of nickel steel.”

That turned out to matter enormously. USGS — Nickel historical development

Because nickel has a very useful industrial property:

Put it into other metals and you can radically change what they do.

Strength.

Toughness.

Corrosion resistance.

Performance at high and low temperatures.

Suddenly the weird false-copper metal that miners hated was becoming extremely valuable.

Funny how that works.

Then the mines got BIG

For a long time, nickel mining remained relatively limited.

Then the industrial-scale deposits started coming online.

The USGS dates a major turning point to about 1875, when the large lateritic nickel deposits of New Caledonia entered production. USGS — historical nickel production

Then Canada changed everything.

During construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883, nickel-copper ore was discovered near what became Sudbury, Ontario.

The Ontario government history of the deposit says that within only 30 years Sudbury had become:

“the nickel capital of the world.”

Ontario Geological Survey — Discovery of the Sudbury Mining Camp

Think about the speed of that transition.

For generations: cursed nuisance ore.

1751: new element.

1800s: interesting alloying metal.

Late 1800s: gigantic industrial mining districts.

And then somebody figured out an almost bizarrely effective way to purify the stuff.

Nickel gets the strangest refining process imaginable

This part could be its own chemistry story.

In the late 1880s, Ludwig Mond, Carl Langer, and Friedrich Quincke discovered that carbon monoxide could react with nickel and produce nickel tetracarbonyl, Ni(CO)₄.

Yes.

Take nickel.

React it with carbon monoxide.

Make an extremely toxic, volatile nickel-containing compound.

Move that vapor somewhere else.

Heat it.

The compound breaks apart and deposits very pure nickel.

What could possibly go wrong? 🤦🏻🤦🏻🤦🏻

Their 1890 paper was simply titled Action of carbon monoxide on nickel. Original 1890 Mond, Langer & Quincke paper

This eventually became the Mond process.

A Canadian government history of metallurgy says the chemical principle was developed in 1888 and was:

“first used on a commercial scale”

at Clydach, Wales, in 1902 to process Sudbury nickel material. Government of Canada — Development of Metallurgy in Canada

That’s a BIG change.

Mining a useful ore is one thing.

Being able to refine the metal efficiently and to very high purity is what helps turn it into an industrial commodity.

And once industry had abundant nickel, metallurgists started putting it into everything.

Stainless steel changed the game

People tend to associate the birth of stainless steel with Harry Brearley in Sheffield around 1913, and that’s fair—but the full story is messier.

Several metallurgists were working on corrosion-resistant chromium steels at roughly the same time.

And here’s the part that matters for nickel.

In 1912, working for Krupp in Germany, Eduard Maurer and Benno Strauss received patents covering two:

“chromium-nickel stainless steels.”

World Stainless — History of Stainless Steels

Nickel wasn’t what made steel “stainless”—chromium is the key element responsible for the passive oxide layer.

Nickel did something else.

It helped stabilize the austenitic structure and gave certain stainless steels their enormously useful combination of toughness, formability, and corrosion resistance.

This is how we eventually get things like the common 18/8 stainless steels—roughly 18% chromium and 8% nickel.

I’m NOT going to go all the way down the stainless-steel rabbit hole here.

Cookware.

Silverware.

Water bottles.

Industrial equipment.

Pipes.

Medical devices.

Jewelry.

Different stainless grades.

How much nickel they contain.

When nickel can come out of them.

That deserves its own article because there is WAY too much there.

But historically, stainless steel was one of the big reasons nickel went from oddball metal to everywhere metal.

And then there’s the “nickel” coin

I can’t leave this out.

Because it is too perfect.

The metal got its name because it was mistaken for copper.

And what do Americans call a five-cent coin?

A nickel.

The United States Mint began producing the copper-nickel five-cent coin in 1866. U.S. Mint — history of the nickel

Guess what today’s nickel coin is made of?

The Mint gives the composition as:

“25% Ni Balance Cu.”

Translation:

25% nickel.

75% COPPER.

COME ON.

The metal named for the fake copper is now the name of a coin that is three-quarters copper. 😂

You couldn’t script this better.

During World War II, nickel was considered valuable enough strategically that it was actually removed from the five-cent coin temporarily. After the war, the copper-nickel alloy came back.

The cursed nuisance ore had become a strategic material.

That transformation is kind of incredible.

From “get this garbage out of my copper” to “put nickel in everything”

And now look where we are.

The 2026 U.S. Geological Survey nickel summary says stainless and alloy steel plus other nickel-containing alloys typically account for:

“more than 85% of domestic consumption.”

USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Nickel

Nickel is in stainless steels.

High-performance alloys.

Aircraft and turbine components.

Electroplating.

Catalysts.

Chemical production.

Rechargeable batteries.

Coins.

Industrial equipment.

And a ridiculous number of other products.

The USGS estimates that about 65% of nickel consumed in the Western world goes specifically into austenitic stainless steel. USGS — Nickel Statistics and Information The same source describes nickel’s major industrial role simply: it is used because these alloys have “corrosion resistance.”

That’s how the history flipped.

The characteristic that frustrated old miners—this mysterious metal wasn’t behaving like the copper they expected—eventually became exactly what made nickel useful.

It was different.

Chemists learned what it was.

Metallurgists learned what it could do.

Miners found enormous deposits.

Refiners figured out how to purify it.

Industry learned how to blend it into iron, chromium, copper, and other metals.

Then we started spreading nickel all over modern civilization.

And THAT is where this history article connects back to the much bigger nickel story I’ve been researching.

The medieval miner could look at the strange reddish rock and say:

Something isn’t right with this stuff.

He knew where it came from.

He knew when he was handling it.

He knew when the furnace started producing nasty fumes.

Modern nickel is different.

Most of the time, you don’t see “nickel.”

You see stainless steel.

A faucet.

A pan.

A spoon.

A piece of jewelry.

A battery.

A metal implant.

A machine.

A coin.

A pipe.

A food-processing surface.

Some giant piece of industrial equipment you’ve never thought about in your life.

Nickel stopped LOOKING like nickel.

In a weird way, the Trickster Metal became much better at hiding.

The old German miners named the ore because it looked like something else.

Several hundred years later, we’ve intentionally built a world where nickel spends most of its time mixed into something else.

Think about that.

And I’m going to stop there, because the next rabbit hole is enormous:

Where is all this nickel actually coming from now—and how are we being exposed to it?

Food. Water. Air. Industry. Agriculture. Smoke. Consumer products. Stainless steel. Plumbing. All of it.

That is where we’re going next.