Why was Copper, Brass and Bronze used so much in the Iron Age? After the advent of Iron copper and it's alloys continued to be indispensable for societies. This video is supported by my patrons over on Patreon / epimetheus1776
Bronze was the preferred material for heavier naval cannons deep into the age of sail due to the consistent quality that you talked about. Though they were monstrously expensive it was considered to be worth it since most ships perform better when your cannons dont blow up when you fire them.
And then came the British. A few sailor boys get blown up? Meh! More where they came from! Add more cannons to the decks! Your enemy's bronze cannons are exquisite, expensive, and outnumbered! Iron cannons are cheap and you can make a lot more of them! "He who throws the most metal, wins." And the British won!
The use of bronze was also common for land cannons up until the late 19th century. It wasn't until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 with Krupp that we see iron cannons replacing bronze models in large numbers. .
The greater hardness and brittle quality of iron was a major factor. Iron cannon have a nasty tendency to blow up because of the stress risers presented by casting defects, a problem which isn't so great in bronze. Before high quality steel was available en masse a few methods were used to mitigate the issue, with varying success. A lot of models had a wrought iron band welded around the breech, which was probably better than nothing. New casting methods (Rodman) or forgoing the casting and welding the barrel out of strips on a mandrel worked better. Bronze was universally preferred for smoothbore guns, but being soft and malleable it wouldn't hold rifling for long.
@@Bramble451 Britain was the nation hoarding all the brass and bronze it could. France was actually the early adopter of iron cannons in a desperate bid to make up the difference.
@@yaldabaoth2actually aluminium wires have been used during copper shortages in the past. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think some US homes built between 1965-1970 have aluminium wires as there was a copper shortage at the time.
@@thegoldencat9368 the real best place to find them is construction yard waste bins. discarded ac units are good for the pipes if you have an angle grinder.
@@yaldabaoth2 copper is about 1000x more plentiful on earth than silver (copper: 70 parts per million, silver: 75 parts per BILLION) so yeah as you said electricity systems as we know them couldn’t exist
There's not really a better way to do it than that. Spice grinders can technically do the job, but why bring electricity into the occasion when you can grind something crazy fine with a mortar and pestle anyway?
TRIVIA: The Aztecs did not have iron, but their _predecessors_ did; they relentlessly polished stones of magnetite or hematite, and some were able to make scale armor from sewing the shiny rocks into clothing. For edged weapons, the Aztecs and their predecessors continued to use stone, particularly obsidian.
Coins were also made of bronze by the Romans. Ships rams recovered from the Punic War era were made of bronze (used by both Carthage and Rome). As one historian described it the rams were "literally made of money."
One explaination of the king Midas story I've heard is that he was really Mita of Mushki, who sponsored widespread brass production in a time most common people had never heard of the stuff, so they thought it must be gold.
I was walking through an exhibit about Pompeii and noticed that a lot of the metal artifacts there were made of bronze. While I'm sure part of the reason is that iron rusts away far easier, I like the idea that, even a millenia after the bronze age collapse, bronze and brass were just so much easier to make that most smiths would prefer to make cookware and the like out of that rather than steel.
great video, I'm actually making copper, brass and bronze armor for my video series covering different styles of arms and armor from different time periods and cultures. currently finishing up Scytho-cimerian style scale armor with Brass details (wanted to make full suite but copper and its alloys are very expensive). other than that, I'm making colchian copper cuirass (try saying that fast) using silver horn depictions as reference. fun! I also want to make a linothorax, cant decide on how to stylize yet. should I go full Greek or do something else?!
I love learning about how different metals came into their own in the hands of man. It is a logical progression, you start with the easy-to-work metals, slowly working up until you've figured out all the metals and start specializing them for their function. I had no idea for example that Rome used brass and bronze for helmets for example. It is amazing just how much these elements have impacted human history.
I had this lttle brass scale and weights as a kid for playing merchant. The fascination with the look and feel of brass stayed with me, gotta give favorite metal to brass 😊
The main reason why helmets greaves, breastplates and other plate armor was made from bronze rather than steel has to do with the difficulty in forming large, thin sheets of steel. This is why you often seen the same areas of the body covered in iron/steel armor that's made from little pieces of steel, like scale armor helmets (very common in China and the Near East). Cataphract armor is a great example as it is often made from steel scales and mail in all areas. Even the Late Roman spangenhelm and similar designs from the Early Medieval period are made from small sheets of steel riveted together. That was the best they could do. It wasn't until the High Medieval period that armorsmiths were able to produce large sheets of steel, and thus the emergence of plate armor.
Could you please make more about historical metallurgy videos!?!? I’m taken a metallurgy class now and I hate it, it’s all chemistry. But when u explain case hardening or using carbon from charcoal in a historical context, it becomes so much better!!!! Love ur videos keep up the great work.
Loved this video that actually tackled the materials themselves that we use to divide history. Humanity using nature and brain to advance. Thanks for the explanation and differences between the metals, advantages and disadvantages.
My favorite part was the little ant running around.🤣🤣🤣🤣 Nah but seriously though, this video was very informative and interesting. Good job as aways Epimitheus!!!
Ancient Warfare magazine had an interesting article several years ago about the misconceptions of bronze vs. iron weapons, which touched on some of the points made here. It attributed some of the misconceptions from the 1954 movie "The Egyptian."
I read somewhere that the quality of bronze metallurgy dropped precipitously by the days of the early Roman Empire and that our current capabilities are lesser than that of the ancients.
I'd say my favorite (reply to final question) would be bronze: it does not just last like forever but it's heavy enough to produce excellent blunt stuff and does a decent job with points and edges (stab and slash). Definitely I wouldn't trust my defense if possible to brass whose best modern use is to make cans.
When tin from tinland is hard to come by, and you need something better than copper and easier to produce than iron/steel, brass is the next best thing. Plus there's the bling factor to consider at that time period.@@LuisAldamiz
@@5peciesunkn0wn - The bling factor is best satisfied with gold or silver... but they won't protect you. I'd rather take a variscite armor, not because it'd be very practical but because the green stone (the Western Megalithic "jade" of sorts) had the bling factor plus, being a stone, probably protects better against deadly blows and arrows than just bling without resistance. More seriously I'm pretty sure that boar tusks' or some other bone/ivory armor maybe was a real thing in the Greek Bronze Age. It combines the practicality and the bling thing in one white shiny thing.
@@LuisAldamiz it was a real thing. We have examples of them. Stone makes trash armor. It takes a long time to shape, it's heavy, and it's brittle. Precious/semi-precious stone armor would also be prohibitively expensive. You'd be better off wearing cast iron with gold leaf over it.
You've really illuminated some things for me. Questions I may have asked myself in passing, but didn't know how to ask online exactly. Like for example why spears would have steel/iron heads and bronze bottom spikes. Why Royal navy cups were made of copper unlike the usual tin or pewter cups of the time. Just little things like that were suddenly revealed and explained unexpectantly. So thank you. Fascinating stuff sir.
Would be nice to have a follow up video with the more modern usage of metals / materials, like how the industrial revolution made use of superior steel, the rise of aluminium, or the electronic comeback of copper. Great video btw
Great Video. I had long deduced why it took Iron so long to gain ground but you managed to explain all the tecical details in a way a troglodyte like myself can easily understand.
One thing people tend to forget is that the ages refer to peak technology and not the most abundantly used material. For instance, even in the middle ages iron was used incredibly sparingly. Only military applications really heavily utilised it. Meanwhile, nails were made of wood, barrels bound with rope, etc. wherever possible... Then one day in WWII, a single naval engagement resulted in so much iron being sunk that it corresponded to all iron mined worldwide since the dawn of iron age to the frigging industrial revolution!
Welcome back, always good to see your videos. May I ask your view points on Arsenic Bronze? As I understand it, before Tin was alloyed to Copper, Arsenic was the popular admixture, is this accurate? Did it see a revival when the trade routes were interrupted during the Bronze Age collapse?
Arsenic mines are also very rare, so unless there was one nearby, i doubt it would see a return. Plus the whole toxicity thing was probably at least somewhat understood at the time? Not a historian tho, so might be wrong, but rarity of arsenic mines is right
The toxicity was well known, but civilizations tend to ignore health concerns in the face of crisis. Also, arsenic, especially in sulfides, is an associated mineral to copper, so while it may not be abundant, it is often found in the same places that copper is. Also, who would mine arsenic just for itself?
@@VeridianHerald exactly, it was mixed with copper. Which meant it wasn't seen as a separate mineral in most cases, but rather a "separate grade copper". Similar to how specific combination of local coal and iron deposits with unique impurities provided Damascus steel, arsenic bronze was naturally occurring but in a few select areas where proportions of impurities in copper ore was just right
We already have sites of note (a couple of the tepes in what is now Turkey) where arsenic free copper was deliberately alloyed to arsenic. This wasn't just an accident of inclusion. To be certain, some places back in the chalcolithic definitely were getting it as a result of mineral composition, but the furnaces and foundries later tell a different story.
Nice video. Just for clarification: some stones CAN be recycled! This should be true for quartz and obsidian, but the question is when people became able to melt these things. Glass required additives to lower the melting point.
My personal preferred explanation for the Dark Age is specifically the spread of useful iron working. In my understanding early iron was lower quality and harder to work than late bronze but it was plentiful. You can find it on virtually any hillside. If you have a bellows and a competent blacksmith you can make virtually anything out of iron, even if it is of lesser quality than bronze. I personally thing think the cause of the dark age is that all the little tribes and lesser kings adopted iron weaponry and tools making them able to resist the bronze armed great kings by being able to mobilize their entire village as soldiers, as opposed to only 1/10 before, making it impossible for the great kings to extort tribute and when the great kings adopted iron working that made the trade routs and diplomacy much less useful since the need for bronze in maintaining power had disappeared.
I work on MRI magnets and need non-magnetic wrenches, screw drivers, and wire cutters. You can buy these really expensive titanium tools which are rather soft and get damaged easily. I've found brass tools to be very hard and durable for the work I do and I prefer them to Ti. Can't say I have a use for bronze in every day life, but brass shows up everywhere, including plumbing.
This is completely wrong. The transition to the iron age occured very quickly and everything instantly became made of iron. This is very well portrayed in age of empires 1.
Well another I guess most trivial reason that's understood by default is that a bronze sword is better than nothing. Like its not as good as a steel sword but you always want to have a bronze sword in that fight against someone.
With steel you have to the right amount of carbon impurities, then you have to uniformly distribute the carbon throughout the alloy which requires a lot of heating and hammering. Then you hammer out the shape you want. Then you have to heat it to somewhere between 727°C to 900°C give or take depending on the carbon content so that the steel undergoes a phase change from its alpha phase, ferrite, to its gamma phase, austenite. In this phase change the iron crystals go from a BCC (body centered cubic) crystal structure to a FCC (face centered cubic) crystal structure and the carbon atoms fall into the interstitial sites sort of "propping up" the FCC structure . Immediately afterwards you dunk it into some boiling oil so it cools rapidly, the phase change wants to reverse but its cooling so rapidly that the carbon atoms are locked in the interstitial sites. The result is a phase of steel called martensite which has a BCT (body centered tetragonal) crystal structure. This process is called quenching. After quenching comes tempering which is heat treating, you basically bake it at around 175°-350°C for two hours so that the crystals can grow. This reduces the brittleness but increases overall ductility. Everything that I just described took over two thousand years to figure out. Copper alloys including bronze, you pour the molten metal in a cast and let it cool. If it's a sword, hammer the edges to increase hardness. You're done.
You’d have to pay me really good money to hammer out something from meteorite. It’s a completely random mix. Sure there’s iron…and zinc, titanium, manganese in large quantities. I’d bet that’s the reason for the lack of meteor iron objects. It’s difficult to work and could put off some toxic fumes. Great video!
People think of iron as the good metal because modern stainless steel alloys with Chrome, Molybdenum and Vanadium and stuff, plus some Titanium and Tungsten for special parts 🤣 Back then, it was the cheap metal with some great properties that would rust like crazy. And once you get to steel, only simple shapes like knife, sword, lance head were easy to make. Medieval knight armor is extremely nasty to shape out of steel, plus then they had modern Toledo steel from blast furnaces. So a no-no for the Iron Age 🙂
