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 melts at cooler temperature than iron
So it’s easier to melt and forge bronze
It took several technological advances before we figured out how to heat up forges hot enough to melt iron
Very short version: Okay, so imagine this – you have access to somewhat (very) limited smelting technology. Your furnaces can’t get hot enough to melt iron, and even if they could, the iron that they made in Europe around 700-500 bc was crappy, because it had a meager amount of carbon in it (carbon makes iron into steel).
So instead, they found these funky, sometimes colorful rocks and found out that if you heat them, they turn into a very lovely, soft, and easy-to-work-with metal. That’s how humanity invented copper.
More in-depth version: In some places, especially around the Caucasus, another ore was commonly found together with the copper ores. This one contained Arsenic – and since the people didn’t know any better, they smelted them together, creating arsenic copper bronze. It was silverish, significantly harder, and altogether more useful. That is how the very first kind of bronze came to be.
Sometime later, people discovered another metal – this time, it was tin. Since by now, they knew that mixing different ores together could make stronger metals, it is not a great leap of logic to assume that they either intentionally attempted to smelt tin with copper, or that it happened by accident – finally discovering the bronze as we know today.
A few hundred years later, they figured out that something similar could happen if they used lead instead of tin. Since it was cheaper and more abundant, lead bronze became very popular. In the end, during the bronze age, there were many types of bronze (some made from copper, tin, and lead all at the same time!)
The issue with iron was, that it required very high heat to melt – around 1500 °C. Since people in Europe could not produce such high temperatures yet, instead of actually smelting iron, they created a very specific, flaky or spongy form of iron that was very pure – less than 0,1 % carbon. That’s quite a big deal, as pure iron is fairly weak, compared to steel. To fix this, they had to carbonize the iron – usually made by repeatedly heating the iron in charcoal furnaces to increase the carbon level to around 1 %.
In China, they had a different problem. They could create temperatures sufficient to melt iron using their “dragon furnaces” (massive structures built into the sides of the hills, using the wind to reach temperatures over 1500 °C), but they were not producing pure iron, nor steel – they were making cast iron – iron with high concentrations of carbon (3 – 5 %). The cast-iron is very hard, but also fragile. So they had to do the opposite of what Europeans did – they had to remove carbon. They did so by melting the cast iron and then blowing air through the liquid metal to react with the carbon, creating carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
TLDR: Making iron was significantly harder because of temperature requirements and specific production, whereas creating bronze was a question of mixing two already known metals in the age when alloys were already being discovered.
PS: Sorry for possibly confusing English, not my first language.
Bronze has lowest minimum defense level required to equip. The order goes: Bronze, Iron, Steel, Mithril, Adamant, and Rune.
Copper was the first metal really used.
It could be cold-hammered into shape, or heated or melted. And it melts at a significantly lower temperature than iron. This is great when you have wood only to heat it.
Some naturally occuring deposits of copper contained other materials which resulted in basically naturally occuring bronze. Tin and arsenic both were naturally found with copper, and both when added to copper creates bronze. Generally surface copper had few of these impurities and the deeper copper had more.
So for quite some time the bronze found was ‘accidental’ bronze.
Surface copper tended to be more pure, and deeper in the ground copper had other metals – and often these other metals were found separate from the copper in the same vicinity.
A little bit of experimenting and early metalworkers discovered if you put a bit of this other component often found in close proximity to copper, you get something even better.
OP said ELI5. Have you played RuneScape before? Iron is always after bronze. And it’s definitely harder to work with than iron. You sometimes lose the iron ores in the smelting process.
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