cobalt
Sign in to saveCobalt is a chemical element; it has symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, somewhat brittle, gray metal.
AI overview
Cobalt is a hard, gray metal that occurs naturally in the Earth's crust only in chemical combinations (except for tiny amounts in meteorite iron), and must be extracted through a special smelting process. It's a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27.
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Article
33 sectionsContents
- Characteristics
- Compounds
- Oxygen and chalcogen compounds
- Halides
- Coordination compounds
- Organometallic compounds
- Isotopes
- Etymology
- Alternate theories
- History
- Occurrence
- Production
- Extraction
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Labor conditions
- Canada
- Cuba
- Indonesia
- Applications
- Alloys
- Batteries
- Catalysts
- Pigments and coloring
- Radioisotopes
- Magnetic materials
- Other uses
- Biological role
- Cobalt deficiency
- Health issues
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
Cobalt is a chemical element; it has symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, somewhat brittle, gray metal.
Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since antiquity for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass. The color was long thought to be due to the metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue pigment-producing minerals. They were so named because they were poor in known metals and gave off poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), which was ultimately named for the kobold.