Interesting Nickel alloys at early TL

[Anders]

I found this passage via the Wikipedia article on nickel.

Originally Posted by Samuel Rosenberg, Nickel and its alloys (1968)

The first manmade alloy containing nickel, believed to date back to 3500-3100 B.C., is a bronze reamer containing 2.73 percent nickel found in the plain of Antioch in Syria [3]. The earliest copper-nickel alloy objects which are known to have survived to the present day are coins minted in Bactria, an ancient kingdom situated north of present-day Afghanistan [4].
Coins (c. 200-190 B.C.) issued during the reign of the Greek sub-king Euthydemus II analyzed 20.038 percent nickel and 77.585 percent copper
[5]. It is interesting to note that this composition is very near that of the 75/25 Cu/Ni alloy used for minting the U. S. five-cent coin.

So it seems you could get a pretty high concentration of nickel, although I don't know if it was intentional. Can you purify nickel with TL 2-3 technology and what interesting and what kind of fun alloys could this yield?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

IIRC, while nickel alloys go way back, nickel wasn't isolated until somewhere around the TL4/5 borderline. I suspect that old nickel alloys are unintentional, like arsenic bronze.

ETA: Or maybe not.

[Anders]

Nickel was purified in 1751, by a Swedish guy - Cronstedt (I wonder if his descendant was the Cronstedt so denigrated by Finnish national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg for the fall of Sveaborg).

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Anders

So it seems you could get a pretty high concentration of nickel, although I don't know if it was intentional. Can you purify nickel with TL 2-3 technology and what interesting and what kind of fun alloys could this yield?

I think the big problem would be that nickel ores are frequently mixed with other metals, so the result from TL 2-3 methods would nickel pre-mixed with something else. On the other hand, this isn't necessarily a big problem, since most applications for nickel involve alloys anyway.

Mostly, the results would be unexciting, though. Nickel makes for good steel alloys, but it's still pretty much like steel. Having access to stainless steel would be nice but not world-changing.

[Anaraxes]

Cupronickel resists corrosion from salt water, and so might find use in seafaring applications. I don't know that it did historically -- perhaps because of expense -- but there we are.

Stainless steel, but then you'll need chromium as well.

There are some very stable alloys that don't expand or change elasticity with temperature. These are good for high-precision instruments and chronometers and so on. If the rest of the TL isn't up to it, though, you may not have any problems that need such high-precision solutions. On the other hand, you can always argue that enabling the solution allows people to find uses for them, whereas if you don't have them at all, people are just stuck.