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Who first isolated nickel as an element?
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nickel processing
Nickel briquettes.
The Swedish chemist and mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt is credited with first isolating nickel and recognizing it as a new element in 1751.123
He achieved this by studying an ore known as kupfernickel—a term derived from "Old Nick," as miners previously believed the ore was bewitched because it resembled copper ore but yielded a brittle, unusable metal when processed. Cronstedt prepared an impure sample of the metal from this ore, which contained niccolite (nickel arsenide).12