What are Some Useful Alloys?
An alloy is a metallic substance that is made from the mixture of multiple metals or, sometimes, a metal with some other element such as carbon. Alloys have been around for about nine millennia, but like most other domains in science and technology, the bulk of progress in alloy technology has occurred in the last few decades. In an alloy, the constituent elements are not meant to combine into larger molecules through chemical reactions, but are merely 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. Shortly thereafter, it was combined with tin to create the stronger bronze, which 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 phosphorous. Co-existing for many years with bronze was the weaker iron, which
