Once adequate provision is made for its extraction and refinement, the material imparts unique properties to the devices manufactured with it. 4 But should the relationship turn sour, a goblin’s retribution can be stinging.įor those who have secured access to the cobalt supply chain, the “goblin ore” is currently treating them very well. Yet according to folklore, goblins will bring good things to the people they live with, as long as they are treated well.

Policymakers, vexed by the challenge that the material’s importance poses to their nations’ security, could be forgiven for following the Saxonian miners in believing that this metal is cursed by goblins. Goethe’s Faust contains the line “and Kobold shall slave,” which has a timely resonance given the Faustian pacts some have made in order to secure access to this critical material, which indeed slaves away at the heart of modern energy storage devices. Meanwhile, human rights organizations are concerned about the poisonous effects that cobalt can have on the communities where it is extracted and the social misery its production sometimes inflicts. 2Īlthough once it was feared for its toxic health effects, 3 today the focus is more on the adverse consequences that cobalt’s scarcity could have on Western economies. Then, as now, the element had a dubious reputation. Upon smelting, the ore (where cobalt is twinned with arsenic, resulting in cobalt arsenide) was found to produce poisonous fumes and became known for causing “mischievous effects” 1 upon miners’ health. The name “cobalt” comes from the German word kobold, which translates as “goblin” or “evil spirit.” When sixteenth-century miners in Saxony discovered the metal, they thought they had stumbled upon silver, yet it was later revealed that the ores were poor in metals that were known at the time.

Project m cobalt legacy daisy