The World's First Nickel

No. If anything has been written recently, I would suspect it would be in a language I do not read.

 

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Nice coin!

I first saw one of these coins several months ago and was quite fascinated at the idea that nickel was isolated and used in a coin at such an early date. As mentioned above, nickel was not easy to extract or refine to relatively pure form by ancient methods (unlike gold or silver), thus the theory of meteorites. Most nickel deposits as encountered near the earth's surface have an upper level of enrichment of about 3% of the pure metal. Not to say that somewhere in Baktria there may have been some unusually enriched source, which has not been rediscovered since ancient times.

I don't know who is thinking that, but there is only one large nickel deposit (out of several that exist throughout the world) thought to have such an origin, that being the Sudbury Igneous Complex in Ontario. The earth's core could be more than 10% nickel, which is a fair bit of metal.

I really don't have a good idea of how these coins came about, I have trouble with ideas about super-enriched sources. The problem with meteorites is that relatively few contain appreciable amounts of nickel, and those iron-nickel types are mostly iron. And collecting more than one Fe-Ni meteorite is rather difficult, unless you are in Antarctica. Therefore it seems that somehow a metallurgical refining process would have to be responsible (for which we do not have historical evidence), as would obviously be necessary if the source were a terrestrial nickel deposit.

 

Interesting coins and interesting theory.

I have to wonder if Nickel was not utilized more in ancient times because of how "hard" nickel is. If I recall correctly, it's one of the hardest metals used in coinage; when each coin was hand struck, it may have taken more physical effort on the part of the minter and so was not used more until coins were made mechanically at a much later date.

 

that being an estimate 30%? of the current sources of nickel?...and that is by far not the only large one (although it is certainly by far the largest), I believe there are several in Russia and elsewhere. I call that a large amount of nickel. Then of course you have smaller deposits all over the earth thought to have come about in this way (certainly they did not need to be a large deposit to feed a small amount of coins minted?)

ALL nickel on earth existed from the planets formation or made its way here after the earths formation since it requires supernova conditions to form thus the question is when it came here...during the earths formation or from material that came after the formation. From all I have read (and I went through a stage where I read a lot about the elements) there can be no way to tell exactly (good guess from other elements found around the deposit) but I tend to think in earths long history a good bit of meteors chock full of nickel has made its way here being deposited close to the surface unlike nickel during the formation which would have, as I have read, been more prone to coglomerate closer to the core.

I find the source of the nickel to be far less interesting than what they did with it, that is, miting coins with it long before it was customary to do so.

also, this is by far not even relatively pure, I believe they said it was just 20% nickel? I wouldnt even call that RELATIVELY pure.

 

What I meant by relative purity was just how would technology of the time been able to take something that might be only 5% nickel and increase it, given the metallurgical challenge that presented. And as noted above, some poor sod had to bash away just to get a mediocre strike due to the hardness.

I would really like to see some SEM work on one of these coins. The chemical fingerprint should be able to yield some good information about origin.

 

Would you have access to the equipment required for this work? Provided it isn't too destructive to the coin, I'd be glad to let you use it.

 

Now that I think about it, I do know of someone who may already have some useful information regarding this coin type and its composition from XRF analysis (x-ray fluorescence). I'll see what they may have concluded and if they would be curious to experiment with your coin. Both SEM and XRF are non-destructive for conductive (metal) analytes. However, they don't penetrate the object's surface very far.

 

Really new info for me! Tfs.

 

I wouldn't be too suprised if it's actually struck on a metal related to a meteor. What would be interesting is if there is any traces of iridium. That would be the key point as a fair amount of iridium found on Earth is believed to be from outer space.