Nickel (Ni)
“The metal that failed as copper so completely that miners named it after a demon — now it keeps your cutlery shining and your kettle hot.”
How its electrons are arranged
Computed from the aufbau principle, with known real-world exceptions applied automatically.
Characteristics
- Configuration [Ar] 3d⁸ 4s² — a Period 4, Group 10 transition metal; nickel almost always plays its chemistry as the green Ni²⁺ ion.
- Corrosion-proof by its own chemistry: a self-repairing oxide film keeps polished nickel bright in air and water for decades — the secret behind its plating jobs and stainless steel.
- Third member of the great magnetic trio — iron, cobalt and nickel are the only elements strongly magnetic in everyday conditions.
- Tricky on skin: roughly one person in ten is allergic to nickel, so cheap earrings and watch-straps can leave itchy green-black marks; laws in many countries now limit nickel in jewellery.
A hard, silvery-white metal with just a whisper of gold in its colour, capable of taking such a high polish that many “chrome-look” fittings are nickel underneath. It is tough yet ductile — drawn into wire, rolled into sheet, hammered into coins — and it keeps its shine for years because an invisible oxide skin seals the surface.
Where you meet it
✦ Uses
- Stainless steel — adding about 8% nickel to iron-chromium steel keeps it rust-free, tough and easy to shape: the cutlery, kitchen sinks, hospital instruments and water tanks of Bangladesh.
- Nichrome heating wire — a nickel-chromium alloy glows red-hot in immersion rods, electric kettles and toasters without burning out.
- Coins — cupro-nickel, a 75:25 copper-nickel alloy, has coined the world’s small change for over a century; the American five-cent piece is literally called “a nickel”.
- Rechargeable batteries and catalysts — NiMH cells power remotes and torches, while finely divided nickel catalyses the hydrogenation that hardens liquid oil into vanaspati ghee.
◍ Everyday examples
- The stainless-steel spoon at breakfast — iron and chromium with a working dose of nickel to keep it spotless.
- A silvery bathroom tap or bicycle bell — most “shiny steel” fittings are nickel-plated underneath.
- The glowing coil of an immersion rod turning a bucket of cold water steaming in minutes.
History & name
Saxon miners met a copper-coloured ore, now called niccolite, that looked rich but yielded not a grain of copper however hard they smelted it; they named it kupfernickel, “the devil’s copper”, after Nickel, a spiteful mountain sprite. In 1751 the Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt attacked that ore expecting copper and instead extracted an unknown hard white metal — which he sensibly named after the demon that owned it. For once the insult backfired: the “demon’s metal” proved superb, and within decades it was plating, alloying and coining across Europe. China, meanwhile, had quietly used nickel for centuries in paktong, “white copper”, a copper-nickel-zinc alloy that bewildered European chemists until Cronstedt’s find explained it.