Nickel was isolated in 1751 by the Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who extracted it from an ore that resembled copper ore but contained no copper. It is a hard, silvery, corrosion-resistant magnetic metal, central to stainless steel, coinage, plating and rechargeable batteries, and a major constituent, with iron, of the Earth's core. Resistant to corrosion and strong at high temperature, nickel is essential to stainless steel and to the superalloys of jet engines and gas turbines, it plates and hardens other metals, and it is a major component of rechargeable batteries. Long before Cronstedt named the element, nickel-iron meteorites were prized across many ancient cultures as sky-iron, a rare workable metal that fell from the heavens; Tutankhamun's dagger blade, analysed in 2016, proved to be meteoritic, its nickel content matching known meteorite compositions and confirming ancient Egyptian accounts of iron from the sky.
The American five-cent coin took the popular name nickel after the metal was adopted for its composition in 1866, and Canada, the world's leading nickel producer through much of the twentieth century thanks to the vast Sudbury deposit, itself the remnant of an ancient meteorite impact, minted actual nickel coins for decades.