Posted 11/16/2022 6:04 pm
In general and technical usage, regular unspecified "bronze" is made of copper, with tin the next-highest ingredient. If there's more zinc than tin, or more zinc than anything else, then it's technically a "brass" rather than a "bronze". For concentrations below 5%, the terms "bronze" and "brass" become somewhat interchangeable, depending on usage. For example, Olympic "bronze medals" are actually normally made of brass (95% copper, 5% zinc); we call them "bronze medals" rather than "brass medals" purely for semantic reasons, as "brass" in the context of a prize or award has taken on the context of being "worthless, gaudy or cheap". If the alloy has high levels of other elements, then those elements usually feature in the name eg. "aluminium-bronze" for a copper-based alloy that's high in aluminium.
"Bronze" is an ancient alloy, as the ancients knew how to separately refine and purify both copper and tin; there's even an entire anthropological period, the "Bronze Age", named after it. Because copper and tin don't normally occur naturally in the same places, you need an extensive system of trade routes in place before you can start to make bronze. The ancients did not know how to make pure zinc, so any "brass" they made came about purely by serendipity: they discovered that adding this or that powder (which happened to contain zinc carbonate or zinc silicate) to the alloy while it was still molten, made it turn golden colour, without really understanding how or why it happened.
In terms of coinage, bronze and brass are preferred to pure copper mainly for durability: the alloys are stronger and more hard-wearing than pure copper, so the coins last longer in circulation. Exactly which alloy each country chooses can depend largely on what's cheap and readily available in that country - after all, there's no point in importing expensive ingredients for your coinage when a locally-sourced substitute works just as well. Britain historically has lots of tin but no zinc, so they tended to use "true bronze". Germany and America, on the other hand, have lots of zinc but little tin, so they tended to choose a high-zinc "bronze that's really a brass" instead.
"Bronze" is an ancient alloy, as the ancients knew how to separately refine and purify both copper and tin; there's even an entire anthropological period, the "Bronze Age", named after it. Because copper and tin don't normally occur naturally in the same places, you need an extensive system of trade routes in place before you can start to make bronze. The ancients did not know how to make pure zinc, so any "brass" they made came about purely by serendipity: they discovered that adding this or that powder (which happened to contain zinc carbonate or zinc silicate) to the alloy while it was still molten, made it turn golden colour, without really understanding how or why it happened.
In terms of coinage, bronze and brass are preferred to pure copper mainly for durability: the alloys are stronger and more hard-wearing than pure copper, so the coins last longer in circulation. Exactly which alloy each country chooses can depend largely on what's cheap and readily available in that country - after all, there's no point in importing expensive ingredients for your coinage when a locally-sourced substitute works just as well. Britain historically has lots of tin but no zinc, so they tended to use "true bronze". Germany and America, on the other hand, have lots of zinc but little tin, so they tended to choose a high-zinc "bronze that's really a brass" instead.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
