The Nickel Goblin

Most people know nickel as a metal, very few know it's named after a mountain goblin.

I spent last week in Germany with a client (hence the brief pause in my LinkedIn posts). After 6 months of working together, this was our first in-person meet. There is no substitute for face-to-face interaction when you want to build real relationships.

One of the unexpected highlights of the trip was discovering the origin of the word 𝗡𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗹. When I excitedly told my wife the story, she suggested it might be better received on LinkedIn so here we go...

Back in the mining regions of Saxony, German miners kept unearthing a reddish ore that looked exactly like copper. They tried to smelt it again and again but failed each time. No copper was produced, just wasted fuel and toxic fumes.

So they blamed the only thing that made sense back then - a mischievous mountain spirit known as "Nickel".

They nicknamed the ore 𝗞𝘂𝗽𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗹, or "𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘨𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘯" because it tricked them into thinking it held copper when it didn't.

Fast-forward to 1751 when the Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt finally isolated a new metal from that same stubborn ore. The miners' nickname stuck and 𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗹 became the name we still use today.

Looking at the recent price action in nickel vs copper it feels like nickel could use a bit of help from another nickname in the metals world - Doctor Copper.