OPOpenPithMake curiosity visibleCHEMISTRY LAB / 02

The Periodic Table

118 elements, raised by their properties.

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About Cobalt

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. The name cobalt derives from a type of ore considered a nuisance by 16th-century German silver miners, which in turn may have been named from a spirit or goblin held superstitiously responsible for it; this spirit is considered equivalent to the kobold (a household spirit) by some, or categorized as a gnome (mine spirit) by others.

The text above is from the lead of the Wikipedia article “Cobalt” (retrieved 2026-11-05), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Data and notes

Column height is a linear display mapping; the shortest column is not zero. Data: PubChem, IAEA.

Solid columns are measured, frosted glass is predicted, empty frames have no value.

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