Brass or Bronze?

Submitted by Bill Anderson, 1st Continental Artillery As we prepare almost every issue [of The Artilleryman Magazine] the confusion of brass and bronze comes up in things written in an earlier time period when the term inology was incorrect, or by modern writers who don t know the difference. We rece ntly came across this in Harold L. Peterson s Round Shot and Rammers (Bonanza Book s, 1969): In almost all the contemporary [18th and early 19th centuries] references the ter m used is brass. Bronze is almost never mentioned. Yet the alloy itself sometime s consisted only of copper and tin, which would make it bronze according to a mo dern definition. Sometimes zinc was added to the copper and tin mixture, and som etimes the alloy used was actually copper, brass and tin. John Muller was perhaps the wisest of all when he avoided the issue entirely and referred to gun metal instead of either brass or bronze, since it is impossible to know exactly the alloy used in any given instance, the terms brass and bronze w ill be used here as practically synonymous. The only brass guns were those made by the uninformed. All surviving antique can non of a copper-based alloy are in fact bronze. The actual definition of gun metal as 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin, which was the strongest of the various bronze alloys w