The company was founded following the discovery by blacksmith Tom Flanagan[2] in Copper Cliff, Ontario of chalcopyrite deposits, while the Canadian Pacific Railway was being built in 1883;[3] the township of Sudbury soon followed in 1884 when JL Morris, provincial land surveyor, laid it out.

In 1893 Robert M. Thompson patented the Orford "Tops and Bottoms" process; this was the first commercially viable method of separating (Fe,Ni)9S8 Pentlandite-borne Nickel from the CuFeS2 Chalcopyrite-borne Copper.

[10][11] Meanwhile, the development of austenitic stainless steel was launched by a pair of Krupp engineers[12][13][14][15] known today as AISI Type 304 or simply 18/8, which indicates a nickel content of 8%.

[4] On 1 January 1929 the corporation acquired the British-owned Mond Nickel Company in exchange for treasury shares, to solve the Frood Mine problem.

[16] A significant proportion of these sales found their way to the United States, with other notable markets including the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany.

Approximately 9 percent of company's total sales from 1934 to 1939 were to Nazi Germany, mainly to meet the growing demand of the country's armaments industry.

[4] The Monel alloy family grew into more than a dozen members, and Duranickel,[45] Permanickel,[46] Ni-span-C, Inconel X and Nimonic were all discovered under his watch, most at his Huntington Works baby.

[4][47] JL Agnew originated the Geology Department of the firm, as a result of his investigations into the Frood Mine problem, which precipitated the 1929 merger with the Mond Company.

[51] Because of the Mond merger, Inco had ownership of nickel properties in Petsamo Province, Finland (now known as Pechengsky District) and had invested a fair sum in them.

[4] Also because of the Mond merger Inco was the owner of the Nimonic technology that allowed gas turbines and jet propulsion engines to function.

[28] The year 1969 saw a bloody four-month long strike at Inco's Sudbury operations, and the firm's share price was cut in half.

[26] Also in 1972 the Inco Superstack was built in Sudbury; at the time senior technical staff like Paul Queneau thought this would solve the SO2 acid rain pollution problem.

[26][54] In July 1974 Chairman L. Edward Grubb decided to diversify Inco's holdings and make the first ever hostile takeover bid for Philadelphia-based Electric Storage Battery Company (ESB),[55] aided by Morgan Stanley.

[56] United Aircraft Corporation entered as white knight and served to increase Grubb's bid to a 110 percent premium above the pretakeover price.

[citation needed] Inco also built and operated a facility that included a research center overlooking Blue Lake in New York's Sterling Forest area.

[5][61] In late 1994, Diamond Field Resources discovered nickel, copper and cobalt ore bodies at Voisey's Bay Mine (VBM) in Labrador, Canada.

[63] In order to generate cash Inco sold its manufacturing sites of nickel alloys to Special Metals Corporation in 1998 for US$408 million.

Not last in the waters was Teck Cominco's Don Lindsay, a product of CIBC World Markets and who had advised Falconbridge in their failed acquisition of VBM.

[63] On October 11, 2005, Inco's CEO Scott Hand announced a friendly takeover bid to buy out the operations of longtime rival Falconbridge for $12 billion.

[72] On June 26 of the same year, Phelps Dodge submitted a friendly takeover bid to purchase a combined Inco and Falconbridge for around $40 billion;[73] that offer was also withdrawn because of the failure of the Inco-Falconbridge merger.

[63][74][75][76] On August 14, 2006 Brazilian mining company Vale S.A. (aka CVRD) extended an all-cash offer to buy Inco for $17 billion.

[85] In May 2023 it was announced that VBM had entered a joint venture with the Ford Motor Company and Huayou Cobalt on a $4.5bn nickel processing facility in Indonesia.

The parent company's chief executive Eduardo Bartolomeo stated that Cutifani could help the division explore a future “liquidity event”.

More recently, the Creighton Mine, owned by Vale and hosting the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, figures largely in the plot of Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.