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Figure 8. The welcoming sign to Los uses the old
spelling "Loos." Sweden mandated a sweeping
orthography reform in 1906 (e.g., "Upsala"to
"Uppsala," "Loos" to "Los,"etc.), but the old spelling
persists for historical names, e.g., the name of the
mine. The sign reads: "Welcome to Loos! Rooms
and breakfast. Cafe." With only a few hundred
inhabitants, Los is far north of the populated areas
of Sweden, and is accessible only by automobile.
Figure 10. Cronstedt in
his laboratory tries to
% ~precipitate metallic copper
by adding iron filings to
the green solution from the
Los ore, but fails." This
; experiment was the key
piece of evidence that
allowed Cronstedt to
conclude that he had
discovered a new
component, int/ ire named "nickel"from the
Kupfemickel of German lore. 5a He was elected to
the Swedish Academy of Science in 1758.
that iron"releases acid from copper"which can
then fall out of solution. Thinking that he had
found a copper mineral, he placed pieces of iron
in the solution to plate out the copper-but
nothing happened (Figure 10).
Cronstedt also noticed that these stones
weathered to produce green spots (Figure 7).
He scraped off this green powder and heated it
with charcoal at the forge at the Laboratorium
Chymicum (Figure 3) in Stockholm. He
obtained a regulus (small ingot) which was
white and magnetic.'a
He subsequently obtained Kupfernickel
from Saxony, Germany (Figure 11) and found it
also produced the same new metal. He pre-
sented his findings'" to the Swedish Academy
of Sciences in 1751 and 1754 and called his new
metal"nickel."' (Note 1)
Figure 9. The Koboltsgruva ("Cobalt Mine') in Los is open to tourists and has numerous exhibits and offers
a mine tour. This mine dates from the 1700s and has been worked for copper, bismuth, and cobalt. A cobalt
glassworks was established at Sophiendal, about 8 km southeast; it was operational only 1763-1771 and
today only scattered ruins remain. As the authors descended into the mine, their Geiger counter (which
they always carried with them) showed an extremely radioactive layer about one meter thick. This was
commonly observed on their travels through mines in Europe!
Igurc 11. The R ihschacht (cow shaft") mine in Freiberg, Germany was once a prolific provider of silver
and also furnished the Kupfernickel that Cronstedt studied. The mine was operational 1514-1834. This
monument on Wernerplatz on Bahnhofstrafe (Railroad street) marks the site of the original shaft (now
filled in). The "Huthaus" (mining shack) dates from 1700 and is today used as a dentist's office; the peculiar
attic window-"eye"-is a "Gaubenfenster"or "German eye."On the monument, Alexander von Humboldt
is mentioned as a student of the Freiberg Mining Academy (1791-1792).
The acceptance of Cronstedt's discovery. In
the pre-Lavoisier era, metals were considered
to be the combination of a calx with the flam-
mability principle (phlogiston). Whenever a
new metal was isolated, such as the medieval
bismuth, antimony, or arsenic, it was consid-
ered not so much a "discovery" as a novel calx-
phlogiston combination produced for the first
time, like a new baking recipe. With a backdrop
of fire, earth, water, and air as the primary ele-
SUMMER 2014/THE HEXAGON
27
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