A few years ago.

A few years ago we had the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. What happened to the Copper and Tin Ages? Presumably they would have preceded the Bronze Age.

Or maybe I just slept through that bit of the history lessons.

I suppose the copper and tin ages preceded the bronze age since the latter is an alloy of the former two.

John

Gold came first but tin and copper aren't a lot of use on their own. I think the first bronze was just a lucky combination of the mixed ore being found long before the constituents were understood. Because bronze can hold an edge and not corrode like copper it found a use so became prized and sought after.

Are we in the plastic age now?

We are in the chuck it away and buy another one age I think.

I think it goes Stone, Bronze, Iron, Uranium, Hydrogen.

regards Martin

I think the present time is actually called the age of technology

Post of the week lol

Tragic but very true, they'll still be digging that stuff up in a thousand years

same as the stone and bronze age things

I'm with Bazlye - the first bronze was just a lucky combination of the mixed ore, not the result of extracting Tin and Copper separately and then melting them together. And "Bronze Age" is archaeological short-hand for a period of time in which Copper based metal tools started to appear, but the alloys weren't necessarily what we mean by Bronze today.

The ancient Egyptians and other civilisations had Copper tools but they didn't make much difference to daily life. Bronze is noticed because a metal that could be made into weapons that held an edge and shaped into armour was a war-winner. We have an Iron Age for the same reason - it walloped Bronze for making tools and weapons and that too changed everything.

What went on in the Bronze Age is pretty murky - no written records. But we know a great deal about modern metallurgy because science was applied to it during the 19th Century and we can track how metal making moved from intelligent guesswork to deep understanding. Brass was a great mystery until the early 19th Century. Made by mixing Calamine with Copper Ore and heating carefully, but no-one knew what was in Calamine. Turned out to be Zinc, hard to pin down because it vaporises well below the melting point of Copper and disappears up the chimney! Brass making was a skilled trade, with the secret passed from father to son, until the chemists worked out what Brass actually contained and in what proportions. Now Brass is easy to make - no magic in it atr all.

Similar story with steel. The prototype Bessemer process of 1856 produced large quantities of good mild-steel very cheaply. But consternation when exactly the same process failed miserably when other steel-makers tried it! Chemical analysis revealed the problem was impurities: by chance Bessemer tested with an ore unusually low in Phosphorous and Sulphur, both of which do horrible things to steel. Fixed by extending the blast and adding flux to burn off everything apart from Iron, and then adding Carbon and Manganese back to get an accurately pure mild-steel. Not quite perfect - later it turned out that batches of Bessemer mild-steel were inferior due to small quantities of Nitrogen left behind by the air-blast used to burn off impurities. Modern blast furnaces fix this problem by blasting with Oxygen rather than Air.

We rarely refer to the 'Steel Age' though it is a thing. 'Steam Age' is more common. Other examples not necessarily material related: Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Age of Discovery, Age of Enlightenment, Axial Age, Plastic Age, Glass Age, Aluminium Age, Computer Age, Information Age etc.

All of these 'ages' are broad tags, I think, that capture the main thrust of a time period rather than describing it accurately.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 06/06/2023 14:11:22

A few years ago...
I started writing essays with a fountain pen. Now I use a computer that even corrects my not so great spelling..
Seeking knowledge was at the Library. I can still remember trawling through the index cards only to find the book was on loan and I had to wait. Now I can get a general answer in a few minutes, empowering my research along the way.

There is so much to do! With this enhanced ability comes the responsibility to make all things a little better in some way to and improve the body of work that represents civilisation.

It is good to look back only to the extent it confirms a path to your future. To me living in the here and now in the knowledge age is wonderful.

I had to drill bronze for the first time last week - it surprised me how difficult it was.

Just think what it must have been like during the Bronze Age!

Copper is not a lot of use on its own! Ask an electrical or electronics engineer. Still they did not exist before the Bronze Age.

I have always thought we still live in the Iron Age but I agree with Dave on that one (having worked in a steel works).

JA

Maybe copper and tin ages occurred together so they combined them into one age called the bronze age.

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 06/06/2023 16:54:08

The ancient Egyptians used arsenical copper tools . Whether the arsenic was in the natural ore or added is, as yet, unknown but the alloy does take an edge sufficient to chop up stones for pyramids.

Rod

Ah, you youngsters don't know you're born! I had to master the dip pen before I was allowed to use a fountain pen, dipping into the inkwell at the right side of the desk (deuced inconvenient for us left-handers) and flicking the bits of pencil shavings and mushed up blotch off the nib before writing. My first founter was a maroon Osmiroid 65, and it cost 5/6d. Well, it was a few years ago...

There was a lot of overlap between the ages. I think some individual's supposed to've had an iron pot in the Trojan war, which was certainly Bronze-, rather than Iron Age. Plus communication was sporadic and uncertain, and those with what passed for metalurgical knowledge would often have been disinclined to share it, so the Iron Age probably came to northern Europe later than the Mediterranean.

Cornish tin was being traded to the Phoenicians in the late Bronze Age, and that argues that they had worked out how to make decent tin bronze of reasonably consistent quality. The variety of copper alloys we might call bronze today makes me wonder if maybe they had a more definitive idea of what they thought of as bronze than we do!

Even the pre-Columbian Meso- and South American civilisation turned up occasional copper tools (not heard of any tin ones) but as SOD said, the metals weren't game-changing enough to be generally adopted or spark any assiduous development there.

Who had their first Biro that leaked in the shirt pocket? Now they are everywhere.

One story is about NASA who spent a lot of money to make a pen that would write in zero gravity. then the russkies used pencils! KISS, keep it simple stupid.

Edited By Clive Hartland on 06/06/2023 21:39:00

Graphite particles floating around a multi-multi million dollar space capsule was considered by NASA to be an unacceptable risk.

On the early Biro front, when I was about ten I had one in my trouser pocket which leaked and turned my leg blue. Not knowing what had happened, I was terrified. Thank heaven for Mums! (Even if I did have to, mortifyingly, take my trousers off in front of her).

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 06/06/2023 22:14:23