Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/268

 254 These were extracted and sold as Suhlian nickel silver, and in 1823 Brande showed that these white granules consist principally of an alloy of copper and nickel, and thus originated the manufacture of the widely used nickel alloys known as nickel or German silver. This German silver, so extensively used as the basis of electroplate, is, as is well known, an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel, the proportions varying according to the use to which the alloy is to be put. Copper is the principal ingredient, and the nickel varies according to the color desired, for it is this metal that has the property of whitening the copper. Sometimes a little iron (from two to two and a half per cent) is added to the ingredients named, with the result of producing an alloy that is whiter and harder than the ordinary composition.

Doubtless all Americans know that nickel is used in coinage, but probably few are aware of the extent to which it is so used. As early as 1837 one Dr. Feuchtwanger, of New York, called attention to the suitability of nickel for coinage, and is said to have actually issued a number of one-cent and three-cent coins made of a nickel alloy. But the first national issue of a nickel-alloy coinage was made by Switzerland in 1850, the issue consisting of twenty, ten, and five centime pieces, containing respectively fifteen, ten, and five per cent of silver, alloyed with ten parts of nickel and twelve and a half parts of zinc, copper making up the balance. In 1857 an alloy consisting of eighty-eight parts of copper and twelve of nickel was adopted by the United States for the one-cent pieces. In 1860 Belgium instituted a nickel coinage, the alloy used for the purpose consisting of seventy-five parts of copper and twenty-five of nickel. This particular alloy appears to have given much satisfaction, for we find it adopted by the United States in 1865, by Brazil in 1872, by Germany in 1873, and still later by Jamaica.

It is not only in the form of an alloy that nickel is used in coinage. Improvements in the metallurgy of the metal have rendered possible a coinage of pure nickel, and it is interesting to note that Switzerland, which was the first to adopt a nickel-alloy coinage, was also the first to issue coins of the pure metal, the Swiss twenty-centime pieces coined in 1884 being pure nickel. In 1886 the Royal Berlin Mint executed for the Egyptian Government a nickel coinage, and during the same year a Birmingham firm coined in nickel five hundred thousand half-decimos and one million centimos for the Republic of Ecuador, while in 1887 Bolivia issued a nickel coinage. It thus appears that nickel is gaining in favor for subsidiary coinage, and not without cause. It is superior to copper in color, and, being more valuable, smaller coins are obtained; both the pure metal and the alloy are hard and thus wear well, and they possess the additional advantage