Swords copper

The metal could not really be used for tools and weapons. It could certainly be forged into knives and arrowheads, but it was too soft. Stone-Age man might see a copper sword as a curiosity and a symbol of a new time, but for hunting and fighting he relied on the good old flint tools. 

FIGURE 1 Copper is easily extracted from its ores and was one of the first metals worked. The Bronze Age followed the discovery that adding some tin to copper made the metal harder and stronger. These four bronze swords date from 1250 to 850 hce, the Late Bronze Age, and are from a collection in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. From bottom to top, they are a short sword, an antenna-type sword, a tongue-shaped sword, and a Liptau-type sword. 

For example, consider copper. Native copper could be worked into various shapes, but was too soft for making tools and swords. Copper smelted from... 

One type of bronze, a mixture of copper and tin, was the first metal used extensively by humans. The Iron Age followed, and by the twelfth century b.c., that element was being forged into all sorts of useful devices. Most of those useful devices were weapons of war—spearheads, battle axes, and swords. Today iron and other metals are made into a much wider (and more peaceful) variety of goods. Aluminum sheathes our airplanes, copper wires carry... 

Because maces can be used to bash heads, they were useful weapons at the time, but not nearly as useful as knives and swords and spears. The discovery that would make those tools and weapons possible is lost in the smoke of prehistory. Like smelting, the discovery was almost certainly accidental and happened because copper ores are usually mixed with other substances. Two prominent impurities are arsenic and tin. Some observant metalsmith must have noticed that the nature and amount of those impurities dramatically changed the properties of smelted copper. 

Tin has a long, colorful history. This metal was discovered first in Thailand over 2000 years ago. Early craftsmen discovered that bronze - a noncorrosive metal that is extremely hard and strong enough to be used for spears, swords, arrows, and other especially important objects at that time - could be produced by smelting tin with copper. Tin is also the primary constituent of pewter. Long ago, people developed the belief that trace amounts of tin seemed to help prevent fatigue and depression, and that drinking out of tin cups could help combat these ailments. Tin... 

The sword shown in Fig. 2 is a two-handed Swiss sword about 4 ft. in length, sharp on both edges with a handle of dark wood around which is wound spirally a heavy piece of brass or copper wire and held in place with round-headed brass nails. The blade and crossbar are in imitation steel. The projecting ornament in the center of the crossguard may be cut from heavy pasteboard and bent into shape, then glued on the blade as shown. 

All of these compounds are bactericidal and the ancients knew that they helped to prevent wounds from festering. Accordingly, Achilles has been represented in ancient pictures as scraping the rust or oxidation products from his bronze sword or spear into the wound of Telephusf. These oxidation products are frequently but incorrectly called verdigris, which latter is really a basic acetate of copper, and is not produced by ordinary atmospheric corrosion of the metal or its alloys. 

At first, copper was used for simple purposes, but its application grew. Today, copper is used in many advanced functions outside the cell, which fits with its advent late in the planet s history. Its ability to both break and make means that it was employed as both sword and shield against other organisms. The immune system, as a consequence, uses copper. 

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