ABSTRACT
Aluminum has had an essential part in aerospace history from its very inception: An aluminum copper alloy (with a copper composition of 8 percent by weight) was used in the engine that powered the historic first flight of the Wright brothers in 1903. Examination of this alloy shows that it is precipitation-hardened by Guinier-Preston zones in a bimodal distribution, with larger zones (10 to 22 nanometers) originating in the casting practice and finer ones (3 nanometers) resulting from ambient aging over the last 90 years. The precipitation hardening in the Wright Flyer crankcase occurred earlier than the experiments of Wilm in 1909, when such hardening was first discovered, and predates the accepted first aerospace application of precipitation-hardened aluminum in 1910.
ABSTRACT
An ancient mine located at Kestel on the outskirts of Nigde, in the Taurus Mountains of south central Turkey, has been dated by radiocarbon and pottery type to the third millennium B.C. Archeological soundings in the mine located cassiterite (tin oxide) in the detritus of ancient mining activity. Cassiterite is also present in veins and, as placer deposits, in streams nearby. Since tin is used with copper in order to form bronze but is thinly distributed in the earth's crust, the presence of tin ore at Kestel offers a source for the much sought after tin of the Bronze Age. The discovery of an ancient mine containing cassiterite sheds light on this question, but also greatly complicates the accepted picture of regional economic patterns in the highland resource areas of Anatolia and of interregional metal exchange in the formative periods of urbanization and metal use in the eastern Mediterranean.
ABSTRACT
Harpsichords and other wire-strung musical instruments were made with longer strings about the beginning of the 17th century. This change required stronger music wire. Although these changes coincided with the introduction of the first mass-produced steel (iron alloyed with carbon), carbon was not found in samples of antique iron harpsichord wire. The wire contained an amount of phosphorus sufficient to have impeded its conversion to steel, and may have been drawn from iron rejected for this purpose. The method used to select pig iron for wire drawing ensured the highest possible phosphorus content at a time when its presence in iron was unsuspected. Phosphorus as an alloying element has had the reputation for making steel brittle when worked cold. Nevertheless, in replicating the antique wire, it was found that lowcarbon iron that contained 0.16 percent phosphorus was easily drawn to appropriate gauges and strengths for restringing antique harpsichords.
