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Latten
Historically, the term "latten" referred loosely to the copper alloys such as brass or bronze that appeared in the Middle Ages and through to the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Such alloys were used for monumental brasses, in decorative effects on borders, rivets or other details of metalwork (particularly armour), in livery and pilgrim badges or funerary effigies. Latten commonly contained varying amounts of copper, tin, zinc and lead, giving it characteristics of both brass and bronze. Metalworkers commonly formed latten in thin sheets and used it to make church utensils. Brass of this period is made through the calamine brass process, from copper and zinc ore. (Later brass was made with zinc metal from Champion's smelting process and is not generally referred to as "latten".) This calamine brass was generally manufactured as hammered sheet or "battery brass Battery most often refers to: * Electric battery, a device that provides electrical power * Battery (crime), a crime ...
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Brass
Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other within the same crystal structure. Brass is similar to bronze, another copper alloy, that uses tin instead of zinc. Both bronze and brass may include small proportions of a range of other elements including arsenic (As), lead (Pb), phosphorus (P), aluminium (Al), manganese (Mn), and silicon (Si). Historically, the distinction between the two alloys has been less consistent and clear, and modern practice in museums and archaeology increasingly avoids both terms for historical objects in favor of the more general " copper alloy". Brass has long been a popular material for decoration due to its bright, gold-like appearance; being used for drawer pulls and doorknobs. It has also been widely used to make utensils because of its low me ...
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Copper
Copper is a chemical element with the symbol Cu (from la, cuprum) and atomic number 29. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. A freshly exposed surface of pure copper has a pinkish-orange color. Copper is used as a conductor of heat and electricity, as a building material, and as a constituent of various metal alloys, such as sterling silver used in jewelry, cupronickel used to make marine hardware and coins, and constantan used in strain gauges and thermocouples for temperature measurement. Copper is one of the few metals that can occur in nature in a directly usable metallic form ( native metals). This led to very early human use in several regions, from circa 8000 BC. Thousands of years later, it was the first metal to be smelted from sulfide ores, circa 5000 BC; the first metal to be cast into a shape in a mold, c. 4000 BC; and the first metal to be purposely alloyed with another metal, tin, to crea ...
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Alloy
An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, opacity, and luster, but may have properties that differ from those of the pure metals, such as increased strength or hardness. In some cases, an alloy may reduce the overall cost of the material while preserving important properties. In other cases, the mixture imparts synergistic properties to the constituent metal elements such as corrosion resistance or mechanical strength. Alloys are defined by a metallic bonding character. The alloy constituents are usually measured by mass percentage for practical applications, and in atomic fraction for basic science studies. Alloys are usually classified as substitutional or interstitial alloys, depending on the atomic arrangement that forms the alloy. They can be further classified as hom ...
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Bronze
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such as arsenic or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as strength, ductility, or machinability. The archaeological period in which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in western Eurasia and India is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BCE (~3500 BCE), and to the early 2nd millennium BCE in China; elsewhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BCE and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BCE, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in modern times. Because historical artworks w ...
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Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—most recently part of the Ea ...
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Monumental Brass
A monumental brass is a type of engraved sepulchral memorial, which in the 13th century began to partially take the place of three-dimensional monuments and effigies carved in stone or wood. Made of hard latten or sheet brass, let into the pavement, and thus forming no obstruction in the space required for the services of the church, they speedily came into general use, and continued to be a favourite style of sepulchral memorial for three centuries. In Europe Besides their great value as historical monuments, monumental brasses are interesting as authentic contemporary evidence of the varieties of armour and costume, or the peculiarities of palaeography and heraldic designs, and they are often the only authoritative records of the intricate details of family history. Although the intrinsic value of the metal has unfortunately contributed to the wholesale spoliation of these interesting monuments, they are still found in remarkable profusion in England, and they were at one ti ...
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Armour
Armour (British English) or armor (American English; see spelling differences) is a covering used to protect an object, individual, or vehicle from physical injury or damage, especially direct contact weapons or projectiles during combat, or from a potentially dangerous environment or activity (e.g. cycling, construction sites, etc.). Personal armour is used to protect soldiers and war animals. Vehicle armour is used on warships, armoured fighting vehicles, and some mostly ground attack combat aircraft. A second use of the term ''armour'' describes armoured forces, armoured weapons, and their role in combat. After the development of armoured warfare, tanks and mechanised infantry and their combat formations came to be referred to collectively as "armour". Etymology The word "armour" began to appear in the Middle Ages as a derivative of Old French. It is dated from 1297 as a "mail, defensive covering worn in combat". The word originates from the Old French , itself d ...
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Livery
A livery is an identifying design, such as a uniform, ornament, symbol or insignia that designates ownership or affiliation, often found on an individual or vehicle. Livery will often have elements of the heraldry relating to the individual or corporate body feature in the livery. Alternatively, some kind of a personal emblem or badge, or a distinctive colour, is featured. The word itself derives from the French ''livrée'', meaning ''dispensed, handed over''. Most often it would indicate that the wearer of the livery was a servant, dependant, follower or friend of the owner of the livery, or, in the case of objects, that the object belonged to them. In the late medieval phenomenon of bastard feudalism, livery badges worn by the "retainers" of great lords, sometimes in effect private armies, became a great political concern in England. Etymology "In the ''Black'' Book of 1483, it was laid down that each person should receive "... for his Livery at night, half a chet loaf, o ...
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Pilgrim Badge
Pilgrim badges are decorations worn by some of those who undertake a Christian pilgrimage to a place considered holy by the Church. They became very popular among Catholics in the later medieval period. Typically made of lead alloy, they were sold as souvenirs at sites of Christian pilgrimage and bear imagery relating to the saint venerated there. The production of pilgrim badges flourished in the Middle Ages in Europe, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries, but declined after the Protestant Reformation of the mid-16th century. Tens of thousands have been found since the mid-19th century, predominantly in rivers. Together they form the largest corpus of medieval art objects to survive to us today. Pilgrimage sites housed a saint's relics: sometimes the whole body, sometimes a body part or significant object owned or touched by the saint. For example, St Thomas Becket was martyred at Canterbury Cathedral in England in 1170 and his body remained there, becoming the epicentre of ...
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Calamine Brass
Calamine brass is brass produced by a particular alloying technique using the zinc ore calamine directly, rather than first refining it to metallic zinc. Direct zinc smelting appears to have been unknown in Europe until the mid-18th century, even though the alloyed calamine brass was in use for centuries, and metallic zinc was produced directly via reducing-atmosphere smelting in India and China from the 12th century CE onwards. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc and, when it was first developed, methods for producing metallic zinc were unknown. Metallurgists wishing to produce brass thus used calamine (actually a mixture of the virtually indistinguishable zinc ores smithsonite and hemimorphite) as the zinc component of brass. The resulting brasses, produced by heating a mixture of copper and calamine to a high temperature for several hours (allowing zinc vapor to distill from the ores and permeate the metallic copper), contained a significant amount of slag material resulting ...
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Calamine (mineral)
Calamine is a historic name for an ore of zinc. The name ''calamine'' was derived from ''lapis calaminaris'', a Latin corruption of Greek ''cadmia (καδμία)'', the old name for zinc ores in general. The name of the Belgian town of Kelmis, ''La Calamine'' in French, which was home to a zinc mine, comes from this. In the 18th and 19th centuries large ore mines could be found near the German village of Breinigerberg. During the early 19th century it was discovered that what had been thought to be one ore was actually two distinct minerals: * Zinc carbonate Zn C O3 or smithsonite and * Zinc silicate Zn4 Si2O7(O H)2·H2O or hemimorphite. Although chemically and crystallographically quite distinct, the two minerals exhibit similar massive or botryoidal external form and are not readily distinguished without detailed chemical or physical analysis. The first person to separate the minerals was the British chemist and mineralogist James Smithson in 1803. In the mining industry t ...
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William Champion (metallurgist)
William Champion (1709–1789) is credited with patenting a process in Great Britain to distill zinc metal from calamine using charcoal in a smelter. Background After Abraham Darby I had left the Bristol Brass Company to form his own new copper works at Coalbrookdale, fellow Quaker Nehemiah Champion took over leadership. Nehemiah had three sons: John (1705–1794); Nehemiah (1709–1782); and the youngest William (1710–1789). Early life and patent As a young man, William Champion toured Europe to learn the art of brass making, returning to become a junior partner in the Bristol Brass Company in 1730. He then experimented for six years to develop a process to create zinc – then known as spelter. Using a scaled-up process similar to that used at the Zawar mines in India where this process was available centuries before William Champion rediscovered it, since the 12th century AD,p. 46, Ancient mining and metallurgy in Rajasthan, S. M. Gandhi, chapter 2 in ''Crustal Evolution an ...
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