60 Fun Facts About Bronze

Roughly what proportion of typical modern bronze is copper?

The rest is mostly tin, though aluminium, nickel, zinc, phosphorus or arsenic can be added for special properties.

Which metal is the main non-copper ingredient of classic bronze?

Brass, by contrast, is copper alloyed with zinc, and old documents so often confused the two that museums now say "copper alloy".

Which alloy is copper mixed mainly with zinc rather than tin?

So-called "commercial bronze" (90% copper, 10% zinc) is really a brass by that definition.

Which harder material, learned by blacksmiths working iron, eventually out-competed bronze for blades?

Bronze is actually harder than wrought iron, but steel holds a sharper edge longer.

Which age followed the Bronze Age in the three-age system?

The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen devised the stone-bronze-iron sequence while sorting a museum collection.

What is the transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age called?

The name means "copper-stone", the era when pure copper tools appeared before tin alloys.

The earliest known tin-copper alloy artefact, dated to about 4650 BC, was found in which modern country?

It came from a Vinča culture site at Pločnik and was probably smelted from stannite, a natural tin-copper ore.

Before tin, what element was commonly alloyed with copper to make an early bronze?

Arsenical copper had a silvery hue and was easier to work, but tin took over because its fumes are not toxic and the alloy was easier to control.

Which part of Britain was a major ancient source of tin, traded as far as Phoenicia?

Copper and tin ores are rarely found together, so serious bronze-making always depended on long-distance trade.

The Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age partly because of a disruption in the trade of what?

Migrations around 1200 to 1100 BC cut tin shipments and raised prices, just as ironworking was improving.

Which mysterious seaborne raiders are among the suspects for the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC?

The Hittite Empire fell and Mycenaean Greece slid into a dark age, while Egypt and Assyria survived weakened.

What is the approximate melting point of bronze?

Copper alloys melt lower than iron or steel, and bronze conducts heat and electricity better than most steels.

What useful property makes bronze suited to hammers and wrenches used near flammable vapours?

Beryllium copper shares the trait, and bronze wool is used on oak where steel wool would discolour the wood.

Which chloride-driven corrosion process, named like an illness, can completely destroy a copper-alloy object?

It looks like a fuzzy green coating and is a chemical reaction, not an infection, usually from seawater or salty soil.

Roughly how much tin is in bell metal, the bronze used for casting bells?

The high tin content makes the metal stiffer and more resonant; as tin rises in a bell or cymbal, the timbre drops.

Nearly all professional cymbals are made from what?

B20 cymbal bronze is about 20% tin and 80% copper; Zildjian has been making cymbals since 1623.

The world's oldest instrument maker, founded in Constantinople in 1623, makes cymbals under what name?

Founder Avedis Zildjian was an Armenian metalsmith and alchemist; the firm is now based in Massachusetts.

Big Ben, the Great Bell of Westminster, weighs about how much?

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast it, and the nickname honours the tall Sir Benjamin Hall who oversaw its installation.

Bronze is used for the windings of the lower strings on which keyboard instrument?

Bronze-wound strings also appear on double basses, harpsichords and guitars.

At which Olympics were gold, silver and bronze first awarded for the first three places?

In 1896 winners got silver and runners-up bronze; the trio echoes the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages of Greek myth.

Which wedding anniversary is traditionally associated with bronze?

Most "copper" coins are actually bronze too, with about 4% tin and 1% zinc.

Which 1958 New York skyscraper was the first to be entirely sheathed in bronze?

Mies van der Rohe's tower used 3.2 million pounds of bronze, and even the window screws were brass.

What unusual property of common bronze alloys makes them ideal for casting detailed statues?

The metal pushes into the finest details of the mould, then shrinks a little as it cools so it comes away cleanly.

Which Assyrian king claimed to be the first to cast monumental bronze statues using two-part moulds?

His statues reportedly weighed up to 30 tonnes and bypassed the usual lost-wax method.

Why do so few large ancient Greek bronze statues survive?

Many famous Greek bronzes are known only through Roman marble copies, which were far more likely to survive.

The Riace bronzes, two rare original Greek warrior statues, were found where in 1972?

Statue A dates to around 460 BC and Statue B to around 430 BC; they are now in Reggio Calabria.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a bronze statue of which god?

Chares of Lindos built it around 280 BC to about 33 metres, and an earthquake toppled it in 226 BC.

What destroyed the Colossus of Rhodes in 226 BC?

It had stood for barely half a century; parts of the fallen giant were preserved for hundreds of years.

The bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius survived because medieval Rome mistook him for whom?

More than 20 other bronze equestrian statues of emperors were melted down; his is one of only two surviving bronzes of a pagan emperor.

The Bronze Horseman in Saint Petersburg depicts which ruler?

Catherine the Great commissioned Falconet's statue, whose pedestal, the Thunder Stone, is the largest stone ever moved by humans.

Rodin's bronze The Thinker was originally conceived as part of which larger work?

It was first called The Poet, and there are 27 other full-sized bronze casts besides the 1904 original.

Which sculpture from Mohenjo-daro, dated to about 2500 BC, is perhaps the first known bronze statue?

The Indus Valley Civilisation figurine is only about 10 cm tall.

The so-called Benin Bronzes from Nigeria are technically made of what?

They were cast from a leaded brass alloy, and most were taken by British forces in the 1897 Benin Expedition.

Most of the Benin Bronzes left Africa in which year?

British forces removed them from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin during a punitive expedition.

Chinese ritual bronzes reached their peak under which dynasty?

The tomb of Queen Fu Hao alone held more than two hundred bronze vessels, many inscribed with her posthumous name.

The Nebra sky disc, found in Germany in 1999, is celebrated as the oldest concrete depiction of what?

Its gold inlays show the sun or moon, a crescent and a cluster read as the Pleiades; it dates to about 1800 to 1600 BC.

The Antikythera mechanism, a 2nd-century BC bronze geared device, is the oldest known what?

It was pulled from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 and modelled the movements of the heavens.

The Uluburun shipwreck off Turkey, from the late 14th century BC, carried a cargo dominated by what?

Sponge diver Mehmed Çakir found it in 1982 after sketching "metal biscuits with ears", the oxhide-shaped ingots.

Bronze mirrors survive from Egypt's Middle Kingdom and are still made on a small scale where?

The Etruscans made bronze mirrors in the sixth century BC, and Japan was still producing them in the eighteenth century.

Which bronze sculpture technique, also called cire perdue, dates back thousands of years?

The oldest known examples are gold objects about 6,500 years old from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria.

Phosphor bronze is commonly used for which marine component?

It also goes into musical instrument strings and electrical contacts, and some saxophones are now made from it.

Bronze bearings can be impregnated with oil to make which proprietary self-lubricating material?

Bearing bronze owes its low friction partly to a lead content of 6 to 8 percent.

Which element, added in the 20th century, is the main alloying element in bronze favoured for statues?

Sculptors like silicon bronze because matching brazing rod lets them repair casting flaws invisibly.

From which language did English borrow the word "bronze" in the 1730s?

The French took it from Italian bronzo, and the deeper roots may run to Brindisi or the Old Persian word for brass.

Why was bronze long preferred over iron for cannons?

Bronze has low friction against dissimilar metals, which mattered before precise machine tolerances existed.

Where does the Latin name for copper, aes cyprium, come from?

Cyprus was the great copper mine of antiquity and was sacred to Aphrodite, whose mirror symbol still stands for the metal.

Which architect designed the Seagram Building, the first building entirely sheathed in bronze?

The General Bronze Corporation fabricated 3.2 million pounds of the metal for the 38-storey tower.

Roughly how much tin is in most modern 'copper' coins, which are actually bronze?

They also contain about 1 percent zinc; alpha bronzes of 4–5% tin are also used for springs and turbine blades.

The gold–silver–bronze trio for medals reflects the first three Ages of Man in which mythology?

The Bronze Age of myth was the era of heroes; at the 1896 Olympics winners actually got silver and runners-up bronze.

In which Washington DC location was the largest, most ornate bronze fountain ever cast installed in 1952?

The Andrew W. Mellon Memorial Fountain used statuary bronze, a quaternary alloy of copper, zinc, tin and lead.

In which country did the Chola-era craft of lost-wax bronze deities survive, at Swamimalai and Chennai?

The silpis of Tamil Nadu still cast Hindu figures with the same ornate detailing.

Which glass-lamp maker famously used bronze bases and fittings in his artisan work?

Tiffany called his product favrile glass; his studio's lamps are now prized collectables.

In which country are bronze mirrors still made on a small scale, in the state of Kerala?

Bronze mirrors were still made in Japan into the eighteenth century, long after glass took over in the West.

What happens to a bell's timbre as the tin content of its bronze rises?

Cymbal makers commonly use B20 bronze (about 20% tin) or the tougher B8 (8% tin).

Bell bronze is used for the heavy 'tone ring' of which stringed instrument?

The roughly 3-lb ring gives the banjo its crisp lower register and bell-like treble.

Which alloy of copper, tin and zinc, once used for cannon, is known in the US as red brass?

Roughly 88% copper, 8–10% tin and 2–4% zinc, it resists steam and salt-water corrosion.

In some Olympic combat sports, how many bronze medals are awarded per event?

Boxing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling give one to each eliminated semi-finalist or repechage winner.

A 1995 study found third-placed Olympians were happier than which group?

Silver winners dwelt on missing gold, while bronze winners were relieved to have a medal at all.

Aluminium bronzes tend to have what colour?

They are valued for their strength and resistance to corrosion, including in seawater.

Which Italian port, once reputed for its bronze, may lie behind the Byzantine Greek origin of the word?

The other theory traces the word to Old Persian birinj, meaning brass.