ShmoopTube

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Shmoop! alright shmoopers brace yourselves for a surprise in the Bronze Age people

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started making yeah bronze yeah pretty shocking we know but we [three guys standing in a living room]

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don't see a lot of bronze hanging around these days why well because we've got

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cooler stuff like steel and iron we won't tell our ancestors that fact

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though it might make them feel bad kind of like our sister after she bought an [girl waving a phone in front of her brother]

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iPhone 7 the day before the iPhone 8 was announced yeah which one are they on

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their iPhone 93 maybe s 112 anyway once people figured out how to make bronze by

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mixing copper with tin they could make weapons and armor that were much much [a man wielding a sword near two armor chests]

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stronger than the stone or leather they were using before this was important

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because apparently hard metal points could kill people more reliably than

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sharp rocks or clubs who would've thunk well bronze raised the military bar pretty military men diving under a bar]

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high before bronze war was basically a bunch

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of dudes fighting with clubs and rocks after bronze war was basically a bunch

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of dudes fighting with nice equipment and training and then one guy who

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refuses to let go of the past so come on Larry you're embarrassing your entire [a man throwing a rock at two soldiers]

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so how exactly did people figure out that mixing tin and copper together made

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sweet sweet bronze did some guy trip and dump his tub of molten copper into a tub [a man tripping over]

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of tin kind of like how they invented reeces well probably not in our

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experience most people are pretty careful when they're carrying their tubs

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of thousand-degree molten copper so let's dig into the real explanation of [a father and son digging in a field]

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it well before there was bronze there was copper to the untrained eye they

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might look pretty similar they're both metally type things that

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are kind of brownish but copper has its own thing going on it's a naturally [a piece of copper with its arms raised high]

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occurring metal that is harder than gold or silver but way softer than iron or

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steel seriously you should watch a rom-com with this guy such a softy well

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the first people who used copper were just picking up lumps of it from the [people picking up copper]

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ground and beating it into different shape how rude all they had to do is ask

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nicely you know copper is great at yoga soon people started heating copper in

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[a piece of copper in a red hot fire] fires and then beating it man copper can't catch a break well that

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process of heating and cooling is called annealing and it made copper much more

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useful it went from Ooh pretty to Ooh maybe we

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can kill somebody with this well over the next few centuries most cultures [a darkened mine]

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around the world had figured out how to make copper weapons like daggers maces

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and copper arrowheads so copper was a definite improvement over stone weapons

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but it was no miracle cure for one thing copper is weak under stress it bends [a piece of copper working out in a gym]

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dents breaks or if you use a technical term smooshes yeah that was fine for

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bowls and jewelry but not so great in a knife

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it also corrodes and oxidizes quickly in the open air so there definitely weren't [assorted copper items on a table]

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many copper daggers handed down from grandpa to little Johnny that could be

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because grandpa's a stingy old crow though well still copper was the first step in

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humanity's long love affair with metalworking and we still haven't broken

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up even though metalworking doesn't call us like it should [boy using a smartphone by sunset]

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