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.

[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.

The deposit was estimated to contain 141 million tonnes at 1.6% nickel and was imagined by the then-chieftains of Inco as a 21st-century replacement for the waning Copper Cliff resource.

[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.

The Xstrata bid was successful, but not before Falconbridge employed a poison pill to delay the acquisition, raising its share price from $28 to $62.50 in the meantime.

[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.

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.