Swedish chemist Georg Brandt (1694–1768) is credited with isolating cobalt circa 1735.[5] He was able to show that cobalt was the source of the blue color in glass, which previously had been attributed to the bismuth found with cobalt. The word cobalt is derived from the German kobalt, from kobold meaning "goblin", a term used for the ore of cobalt by miners. The first attempts at smelting the cobalt ores to produce cobalt metal failed, yielding cobalt(II) oxide instead. Also,because the primary ores of cobalt always contain arsenic, smelting the ore oxidized into the highly toxic and volatile oxide As4O6, which was inhaled by workers.
Nickel is a mischievous sprite in German mythology. It became the name of the metal through a contraction of the German name for niccolite - an ore of nickel - Kupfernickel. The Kupfer element of this word is German for copper and Kupfernickel is used in the sense of "false copper" because niccolite bears a resemblance to copper-ore. The German miners were looking for copper but could obtain none from the mischievous Kupfernickel.[9]
One of my favorite things that makes me smile is that the name for the bread "pumpernickel."
The Philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states about the Germanic origin of the word, in the vernacular, Pumpen was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, a word similar in meaning to the English "fart", and "Nickel" was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., "Old Nick", a familiar name for Satan), or more generally for a malevolent spirit or demon. Cf. also the metal nickel, probably named for a demon that would "change" or contaminate valuable copper with this strange metal that was much harder to work. Hence, pumpernickel is described as the "devil's fart", a definition accepted by the Stopes International Language Database,[2] the publisher Random House,[3] and by some English language dictionaries, including the Merrian-Webster Dictionary.[4] The American Heritage Dictionary adds "so named from being hard to digest."