Bronze
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-01-19

Bronze, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4169 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Bronze
#Copper alloys
#Tin alloys
Bronze

Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12-12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (such as aluminium, manganese, nickel or zinc) and sometimes non-metals or metalloids such as arsenic, phosphorus or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as stiffness, ductility, or machinability.

The archeological period in which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in India and western Eurasia is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BC, and to the early 2nd millennium BC in China; everywhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BC and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BC, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in modern times.

Because historical pieces were often made of brasses (copper and zinc) and bronzes with different compositions, modern museum and scholarly descriptions of older objects increasingly use the more inclusive term "copper alloy" instead.

There are two basic theories as to the origin of the word.
The Romance theory goes with the word "bronze" (1730–40) was borrowed from French "bronze" (1511), itself borrowed from Italian "bronzo" "bell metal, brass" (13th century) (transcribed in Medieval Latin as "bronzium") from either,
The Proto-Slavic theory reflects the philological issue that in the most of Slavonic languages word "bronza" corresponds perfectly to "war metal" ("bron" - defensive, "za" - hot-worked metal; cf. "zelé(želě)zo" - iron,) while at the early stages of the Bronze working it was used almost exclusively for military purposes.

The discovery of bronze enabled people to create metal objects which were harder and more durable...