Alloys are mixtures of metals or metals with other elements. Advances in alloy technology have occurred in recent decades. Copper and tin created the strongest bronze, followed by iron in the Iron Age. Steel is iron with a small amount of carbon. Other alloys include brass, cymbals, and gold/silver jewelry. Different temperatures create different properties in alloys.
An alloy is a metallic substance that is made up of a mixture of several metals or sometimes a metal with some other element such as carbon. Alloys have been around for about nine millennia, but like most other fields of science and technology, most of the advances in alloy technology have occurred in recent decades. In an alloy, the building blocks are not meant to combine into larger molecules through chemical reactions, but are simply mixed together. When there are different ratios between two or more metals, the alloys produced have slightly different properties.
The first metal to be extracted from ore was copper. Soon after, it was combined with tin to create the strongest bronze, which has dominated human technology for thousands of years. This period is now called the Bronze Age.
Other metals mixed with copper to form cruder variants of bronze were manganese, aluminum, silicon and phosphorus. Coexisting for many years with bronze it was the weaker iron, which quickly decomposes into rust. Eventually, historical forces caused iron to supplant bronze in human tools, ushering in the Iron Age around 1000 BC, although this date varies depending on the civilization and region considered.
Steel is another of the familiar alloys. Steel is iron combined with a small amount (~2%) of carbon, which makes a difference in strength and resistance to oxidation. While there is evidence of steel dating back thousands of years, it wasn’t mass-produced until 1855. The key to steel’s power is the way carbon disturbs the otherwise regular crystal arrangement in iron, making the crystal layers likely to slip past one another.
Brass, a decorative metal used to make many musical instruments, is the name given to a collection of copper/zinc alloys. The cymbals used in percussion are an alloy of copper and tin, like bronze. The gold and silver used in jewelry is not pure gold or silver, but is typically an alloy containing a small percentage of copper or other metals. The solder used in electronics is made of lead and tin. The process of extracting iron from ore results in alloys that contain varying amounts of carbon, including wrought iron, cast iron and cast iron. Stainless steel, used in the construction of high-rise buildings, cutlery and other items, contains chromium, making it highly resistant to tarnishing.
When alloys are mixed at different temperatures, different properties result: at higher temperatures the metals are mixed more finely, while at lower temperatures they are more heterogeneous. Alloys usually don’t melt all at once when exposed to heat, but rather form a soup filled with chunks of metal that have a higher melting point.
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