Nickel: discovery and industry development, nickel history-Metalpedia

Before nickel's actual discovery and isolation, it had been used unintentionally by human beings for centuries. It had been mistaken by ancients for silver, copper and steel. Traced back to 3500 BC, Syrian bronzes contained a small amount of nickel. Between 1700 BC and 1400 BC, manuscripts from China suggested white copper (cupronickel) was used. In 235 BC, coins in China were made of nickel. And in the 17th century nickel was exported to Britain but the nickel content of cupronickel was not discovered until 1822. Also in the 17th century, German miners discovered a red-colored ore which they believed contained copper. However, analysis proved there was no copper but a useless, smelly material was actually present. Finally in 1751, Swedish scientist Baron Axel Frederich Cronstedt isolated nickel from an ore closely resembling kupfernickel. Therefore, he named this new element after the traditional mineral.
Since the mid-19th century, nickel has been a component of coins in the United States, India, Switzerland and Canada. Coins of nearly pure nickel were first used in 1881 in Switzerland and more notably 99.9% nickel five-cent coins were struck in Canada (the world's largest nickel producer at the time). Gradually, considering the cost of nickel, the material in coins was replaced by using substitutes, with only a few countries using the metallized coating.

Along with developments in society, the nickel industry worldwide has itself developed rapidly since 1974, and nickel plays an important role in the stainless steel industry, battery industry and certain other industries. Gradually, with the development of the above industries, nickel consumption across the world increased greatly between 1974 and 2011.
However, as the stainless steel industry has moved into maturity in most developed nations, current consumption has tended to be stable in those countries. While production in recent years has been steadily increasing, at the same time, affected by global recessions, nickel oversupply has been a direct cause of its declining price. Meanwhile, taking environmental protection and energy conservation into consideration, nickel applications within the battery industry -such as nickel/metal-hydride (Ni/MH) batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) - have been developed and gone into mass-production in developed countries. In addition, the nickel recycling industry is developing fast. Therefore, with improving technology, the worldwide nickel industry will have much room to develop.