The largest coin in the world is a 1951 Canadian nickel. But you can’t put this one in your pocket: it's about 30 feet high and two feet wide. The Big Nickel, a popular tourist attraction in Sudbury, Ont., commemorates the 200th anniversary of the isolation of metallic nickel by Swedish mineralogist and chemist Baron Axel Frederic Cronstedt and indirectly also pays homage to the ingenuity of another chemist, Ludwig Mond, who developed the first commercial process to produce pure nickel. The Sudbury area is rich in nickel-bearing ore and has a long history of supplying the metal to the world, a process in which Mond also played a large part.
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