Bronze: the colour of beach gods and goddesses (later to shrivel to wrinkled walnut shells, of course), and also of third place at the Olympics. And, occasionally and with very good taste, the metal making up your door hardware in a traditionally renovated home! What’s the go with this illustrious metal?

Bronze is not an elemental metal –it is not dug out of the earth, it is made up by humans from copper and tin. Occasionally other elements are added, like aluminium, silicone, or phosphorus, to make bronzes with different properties. The Bronze Age was when it was used most widely as a metal – this is generally accepted to have run from about 3500 BC to 1100 BC or so. Obviously the entire period was not just people thinking of different things to make with bronze … it is a very useful metal, but not quite that absorbing! This period in different areas was also the genesis of customs like the individual burying of the dead as well as cremation burials, social hierarchies growing in complexity, and other huge events, such as the invention of writing!

As a practical metal, bronze is thought to be superior to iron in almost every way. This is strange given the relative rarity of bronze in modern culture – and its third place status compared to gold and silver! It is less brittle than iron, and so much easier to work. It only oxidizes on the surface, and then once this oxidation occurs, it protects the rest of the metal from corroding further. Like that layer of dirt on the 1974 model sedan we used to have! It has a lower melting point than iron, so you don’t need as hot a fire to make it workable, and is also much more corrosion resistant. Think of the trouble that rust causes you … which never occurs with bronze.

If you have bronze door furniture, it will have memorable in all sorts of exotic areas. Your door furniture’s relatives will be found being shot out of cannons – as it has a low metal to metal friction. This also means it will be phoning up the bearings and bushings in your fridge motor at all hours of the night, not to mention the bushings in your generator! It will also occasionally talk to the hammers and mallets out the back – it is used to make these implements because it doesn’t create sparks when struck. So we may have found one of its weaknesses … no good for making a cooking fire when you are lost in the forest!

And as well as the pieces of art you’ll find on the Architectural Classics site for your doors, bronze is also highly prized for cast metal statues and vases. Because bronze expands slightly before it sets, it can fill in extremely fine details in moulds. So if you have a French or similarly detailed style of home, you’ll most likely be looking at bronze hardware.

And for the sweet-toothed among you, the fact that it looks like you have decorated your house with chocolate is just an added bonus!

Photo credits: Bronze door by Chris Beckett

          

This entry was filed under Door Furniture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.