I would have thought that with bronze being an alloy it would have been more difficult to work with than iron, so why was it the first to become widely used?
In: 2489
Bronze is made from copper and tin, copper and tin have a much lower melting temp compaired to iron so it was easier to work with until they could make fires hot enough to melt iron
[removed]
Places started with copper
Copper is soft, workable, and melts into a liquid at temperatures achievable by a wood fire(1100 C)
Iron is hard and does not melt into a liquid in a normal wood fired kiln, it only melts if you get it up to 1500C. You need a special charcoal fired bloomery to process iron ore so you first need a good source of iron ore *and* charcoal.
Tin, similar to copper, will completely melt so all it takes is for someone to mix the two and discover that bronze is *wayyy* harder than copper making it much better suited for weapons.
Because bronze has a lower melting point. Iron melts at about 1500C, Bronze at about 1000C. There are other metals that melt at lower points but they have other undesired properties, mostly they are to soft to make tools out of them.
Bronze has a much lower melting point than iron, making it easier to work with and shape. The real difficulty was the logistics of sourcing all of the tin you needed; we still don’t entirely know where the Bronze Age civilizations got theirs.
It’s called iron age, but really it’s age of ferrous metallurgy – most notably steelmaking. Iron cannot be so easily reduced as tin or copper, or well you can, but it results in alloy of so [high carbon content](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron) that it’s completely unusable. Modern metallurgy has [ways](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_oxygen_steelmaking) to work that to steel, but ancient metallurgy didn’t so they couldn’t start with that route.
Instead they used [bloomery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) process, which reduces iron without ever truly melting it. It produces a porous impurity filled mass or iron and working it into usable steel billet takes a lot of effort and bit of skill, even then quality is poor. There is an [easy and low tech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel) way to do better, but to invent it you either need to be very lucky or have some basic understanding of metallurgy.
Ancients had no understanding of metallurgy, it was all trial and error and pure dumb luck, so hard way it was for most of the world right until modern times. Making minimally usable steel is much more complicated than making minimally usable bronze.
It’s all about the temperature!
Iron ore takes some really high heat to melt, so it requires special furnace designs or extra tech like bellows to get the temp high enough to work it.
Copper and tin can be melted at much lower temperatures, and were some of the first metals being worked on with basic forges be so mixing them together was a lot easier for people to figure out / invent first before they learned to melt the tougher elements.
because copper and tin melt at “low” temperatures and were “widely” used. someone had the idea (or made an error) and mixed the two materials: “ehy it’s harder!!”
Iron is way more difficult to melt; due to the higher melting temperature
Because Iron is harder to produce (or was for them).
copper and tin (bronze) were easier to produce and work with, it needed lower temperatures.
Iron needs like 1500+ degrees and they didn’t have the technology to make such high heat at the time.
Copper and Tin were easier to work with. They have lower melting points, and can be cast into molds, for various things.
Iron at the time however, was a much more intensive task. It was abundant yes, but to heat it to a workable state was difficult, as the furnaces available weren’t hot enough.
Latest Answers