The mystery of Paktong

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The Mystery of Paktong THE FOLLOWING is related in Mechanical Topics of the International Nickel Company. "Three hundred years have passed since that day when a great, storm-beaten East Indiaman swung slowly around in the Thames River and headed her bow towards the wharf. Home again! A year ago she had sailed away from London bound for the Orient. Now she was back with a cargo of tea and silk and spices and something new--exquisite metal articles such as no man in Europe had ever seen. "They were made of a metal that shone with the soft luster of sterling silver. Yet they were certainly

not silver, for this was a strong, hard metal. 'Paktong' the Chinese called it, and they jealously guarded the secret of how it was made. "As reports of the strange metal spread, European metal workers tried for generation after generation to produce an imitation Paktong. They never knew why each different mixture produced only another failure until the middle of the eighteenth century when a new metal was identified by one Swedish scientist and recognized by another as the mysterious alloying metal that made Paktong. It was the same metal which miners had found in Saxony and cursed as 'nickel.' "