Periodic Tales

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Next door to Geevor, the Levant mine reminds me of my purpose. Are these the Cassiterides? Levant, the traditional name of the eastern Mediterranean shore, seems too obvious a clue. It makes me suspect a certain amount of romantic post-rationalization. If a shaft can be named Mexico in the hope that it might yield riches the equivalent of that country’s silver, then surely other names may mean as little. But I am assured that the name dates back well over 1,000 years, and arose from commercial links with a Mediterranean trading company. I learn that in addition to the Isles of Scilly, the island of St Michael’s Mount, then known as Ictis, in the sheltered southern bay between Land’s End and the Lizard, may also have been a point of loading British tin for export.

  Cornish tin was exceptionally pure, and maintained its reputation throughout Europe for centuries. Most of the mines only closed in the mid twentieth century–the reason they look so fine is not that they have been restored, but simply that they haven’t had time to fall down. A few mines, such as Geevor, pressed on until around 1990, by which time the international tin cartel had collapsed and the price of the metal fell below three dollars a pound, making further mining uneconomic. Recently, the price of tin has recovered, which has encouraged hopes that mining may restart. ‘Cornish people want to see it back,’ David Wright, Geevor’s assayer-turned-tour guide, tells me. ‘It caused a great deal of misery, but it’s part of Cornish history.’

  Primo Levi calls tin a ‘friendly’ metal. He lists high among its amicable qualities that it gives us bronze, ‘the respectable material par excellence, notoriously perennial and well established’.

  The raw material for bronze in antiquity was copper ore that, unknown to the metalworkers of the day, contained enough tin to make the alloy. In many places, bronze and copper must have been thought of as distinct metals. There was no quest for the elements and no incentive to try to separate bronze into ingredients since it was already the superior metal for so many purposes. In a few places, pure tin was smelted from its own ore, cassiterite, and, too soft for weapons and utensils, was formed into ornaments. Where tin and copper were obtained from separate ores, it was naturally not long before bronze was being made purposely by putting the two metals together. Once it was known that bronze could be made in this way rather than relying on ores that happened to contain the right proportions of copper and tin, the hunt was on for the miraculous metal which had the power to make copper both more useful and more beautiful.

  Yet it is not only as the essential ingredient of bronze that tin has found its role. The metal has its own advantages. Unlike lead, it is shiny and bright. It is strong enough to make useful items, yet soft enough that these articles may be formed by simple hammering, demanding no great artisanal skill. Above all, it is easily smelted and cast, melting at 232 degrees Celsius, far lower than copper or silver.

  I knew this from repeatedly melting and casting the same piece of tin in different shapes as a boy. But I am reminded of it when I go along to a workshop intended to reacquaint designers and academics who spend their days creating computer graphics or completing student assessments with the quiddity of real materials. Our tutor for this exercise in casting tin is Martin Conreen of Goldsmiths College in London. Conreen has the twinkle in his eye to make a good department-store Santa Claus, although his beard is ginger. Gleefully, he reaches into his sack and distributes his metallic hoard, a small, shining ingot of tin for each of us–and a cuttlefish bone. Cuttlebones, Conreen explains, have been used at least since Roman times as moulds for tin ornaments. We eye him doubtfully, but as soon as we start scraping away for ourselves we understand why. The porous bone is easily carved but also able to withstand the heat of the molten tin. Carefully, we melt our tin and pour it into the recesses we have carved in the bone. After a few moments cooling, it is possible to turn out the trinkets. Their weight and silvery lustre make them a delight to hold. The molten metal has faithfully followed every runnel I carved and has even picked up the fine honeycomb texture of the cuttlebone itself, adding a serendipitous layer of natural ornamentation. The satisfaction of making something so solid and pleasing tells in the silly grins on our faces.

  Because tin is so readily recast, it has a special value in storytelling: it may be recast in different roles. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ ends tragically with the soldier being consumed in a fire along with the paper ballerina he loves. Raking the ashes later, a maid finds that the soldier has melted into the shape of a heart. Tin is disposable yet also indestructible; the tin soldier is mortal, but his love endures. He is also cruelly subject to fate. The boy who features in the story has thrown him ‘without rhyme or reason’ into the fire. And there is a hint at the beginning that fate will be playing a part as the tin hero is already different from the other twenty-three soldiers in the box: he was made last when the metal was running out and has only one leg. This fatal thread in the tale, too, is drawn from the way the metal is handled: the die is cast at the beginning and recast at the end.

  Its ease of working made tin the commonplace metal. Bronze was reserved for weapons, gold and silver for the Church and court. Ironware required the services of a blacksmith, but anybody might work a piece of tin into something useful. For the peasant, tin stood in for all of these metals for ornament and utensil alike and was made into plates, jugs and tankards, musical instruments, jewellery and toys.

  Tin was also ideal for making prostheses which could be moulded and beaten to follow the intricate shapes of the body. The phrase ‘tin ear’, meaning tone-deaf, dates from the days when people could all too easily lose an extremity to the ravages of the pox or some grim accident. (Copper noses were not unknown either.) The Tin Woodman in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a woodchopper whose axe is bewitched such that it severs his limbs one after another and then finally lops off his head. Each time, he is given replacements of tin–though his chronically rust-prone joints suggest that metallurgy wasn’t Frank Baum’s strong suit.

  Medieval craftsmen worked with tin as it came: smelted from the ore without further refining. Though Cornish tin was renowned for its purity, even this metal was frequently contaminated with lead, copper, antimony and arsenic, which affected its properties–often for better, sometimes for worse. Later bismuth was added in small amounts to convert the soft metal into a harder, more lustrous and sonorous alloy. Bismuth indeed was thought to be a mixture of lead and tin until proper chemical investigation in the eighteenth century showed that it was a distinct element. (Today, most of us encounter bismuth only when we have an upset stomach: it is the pepsin-zapping active ingredient of Pepto-Bismol.)

  The alloying of tin was the secret of the pewter smith. Pewter today probably conjures up images of christening mugs of dubious taste or the engraved tankards of the regulars in unreconstructed pubs. Historically, it was an alloy mainly of tin with lead, which fell from favour when the poisonous nature of the latter was understood. Today pewter is entirely made from tin with a little antimony, bismuth and copper. The Worshipful Company of Pewterers is one of the oldest of London’s guilds, with its origins in the fourteenth century, but it is making a determined effort to rehabilitate the metal with an annual competition for designers, who respond valiantly with necklaces and wine coolers and light fittings that do indeed succeed in slipping the shackles of history.

  While pewter struggles to retain its foothold as an attractive material, tin has become a pejorative term for any cheap metal. Low-value coinage, usually based on copper, is ‘tin’. Henry Ford’s Model ‘T’, the most basic of automobiles, made of steel, was the Tin Lizzie. Hastened by the growth of tin-plating during the nineteenth century, tin has stretched to become a looser metaphor for anything superficial or contemptible, for the marked-down and the jumped-up. Rudyard Kipling invented ‘the little tin god’ as an epithet for any petty despot in his Departmental Ditties of 1886. ‘Tin-pot’ continues to be used as an adjective, reserved almost exclusively for foreign dictators, to describe one who
is reliant on the finery of his office to disguise his underlying corruption–British leaders were naturally never tin-pot themselves.

  The metaphor is hardly fair to the metal, as the tin of the tinned cans which fed the British Empire was there to prevent corruption in the first place. On one occasion, as part of a student lecture at Guy’s Hospital in London, a tin of meat left over from a naval expedition in 1826 was opened some twenty years later. The contents were found to look and smell good, so good in fact that they were swiftly consumed by some passing hospital staff.

  Tinkers, too, are regarded with suspicion. The label is popularly supposed to apply to tinsmiths, but really refers to any itinerant mender of utensils. Somebody who tinkers is generally guilty of inept or uncertain handiwork. The dignity of the itinerant and of tin is reasserted, however, in Rose Tremain’s recent novel The Road Home, which describes the experience of Lev, a migrant from Eastern Europe who travels to Britain for work. Tremain subtly opposes two elements, sodium and tin, in her narrative. Lev’s bus crosses into Austria during the night and stops for petrol under a ‘sodium sky’, a recurrent image. Back in Poland, his grandmother supports his family by making jewellery out of tin. Sodium signifies the modern, technological sophistication, the urban West. Tin speaks of home in the rural East of simple crafts, a world Lev evokes so fondly that even his Irish flat-sharer considers moving there. Tin, like Lev in the story, is compliant and cheap but nevertheless fundamentally honest and decent.

  Tin is said to cry when a stick of it is bent or broken, which Primo Levi gives as one further reason for considering it a friendly element, even though he doesn’t appear to believe it–‘never seen or heard (that I know) by human eye or ear’.

  Levi’s ignorance and incuriosity on this occasion is a puzzle. I have certainly heard this weeping, and I heard it again during Martin Conreen’s materials master-class as I tortured my own piece of tin–a drawn-out cracking sound with a squealing overtone, like the opening of a door in a horror film, as the crystals of metal were wrenched apart. In truth, the phenomenon is not even unique to tin but can be produced by stressing any suitably brittle metal.

  The sound world of tin is special nevertheless. Its very name rings: tinnnnn. And this is not by chance. As the metal most commonly made into domestic utensils, tin brought sonority into ordinary lives. The ringing of bells and gongs confined to Church and state rituals received a humble domestic echo in the sound of tin on tin in people’s homes. The quality of the metal was measured by the purity of its ring. The onomatopoeia is widespread. The English word comes from the Old High German zin–it’s still Zinn in German, and has similar names in other Nordic languages. The French word, even though it derives separately from the Latin stannum, is the almost homophonous étain. The word ‘zinc’, it is worth noting in passing, may also stem from zin, which may have something to do with the uncertain chemistry of a time before it was known that zinc was an element distinct from tin. Lead, incidentally, Shakespeare’s ‘dull lead’, is named with equal onomatopoeic truth because it does not ring, the more so in Scandinavian languages where it is called lod.

  Zoe Laughlin, a materials scientist at King’s College London, has made a study of the characteristic sounds made by different materials, going to the trouble of making identical tuning forks in glass and wood as well as various metals. She then noted the sound they made when struck, recording objective measurements of pitch and timbre, loudness and attenuation, as well as asking a panel of musicians for a more subjective assessment. She found that steel forks produced the brightest sound at the highest pitch. Copper and brass sounded deeper but almost as bright. For reasons that remain to be explored, the brightest tone of all came from a steel fork that had been plated with gold. Sadly, a fork cast in solder, which is mainly tin, failed to produce a tone, and soon exhibited signs of metal fatigue: whether it cried is not recorded.

  Many of the words to do with ringing metals are generic; it doesn’t matter which metal is being beaten. Tinkers then are not exactly tinsmiths, but so called from the tinking sound made by their working with metal, be it tin or something else. In Spain tinkers are known as quinquilleros and French ironmonger’s stores are quincailleries, the words amply expressive of the clanking sound of any metal merchandise. Norse and Germanic myth makes a strong connection between smithing and song, and we still speak of ‘hammering out a tune’, something Wagner depicts literally in Alberich’s subterranean forge in Das Rheingold.

  Other sense associations are specific to tin, notwithstanding Laughlin’s disappointing result with the tuning fork. Some are physically connected with the material’s properties, but others reach figuratively deeper into the aural world. Most majestically resonant of all, organ pipes are traditionally made of tin alloyed with lead, the proportions variable according to the tone that is desired. At the other end of the spectrum, tin whistles and tin drums need not be made of tin but certainly have the sound that we characterize as tinny. Tin Pan Alley in New York got its name from the noise made by the pianos of composers–tune-smiths–banging out popular melodies. Even tinnitus, the sensation of ringing in the ears, joins this clangorous family.

  Let us leave this element to the sound of bells, or tintinnabulation. Bells can be made of any sonorous metal–my friend Andrea Sella even has one made of mercury waiting in a deep freeze at the chemistry department of University College London for the cold day when it will be rung.* But it has long been known that an alloy of copper and tin in the proportions of three or four to one produces the best tone. This special bronze is brittle and notoriously difficult to cast, and a number of old fables turn on the fortunes of the person who possesses the secret of bell-making. Many bells have cracked, among them the Liberty Bell, which, having safely crossed the Atlantic in 1752, split from lip to waist upon its first striking in Philadelphia. Big Ben, too, cracked shortly after it was installed in the newly built Houses of Parliament in 1859. The pompous bronze of statues may be respectable par excellence, as Levi suggests; bell metal, with its greater proportion of tin, rings out the happy imperfections of humanity.

  Dull Lead’s Grey Truth

  During the 1880s, Auguste Rodin, the most famous and controversial artist of his age, created what would prove to be his most popular work, The Thinker. It was intended as the central feature of a much larger composition, The Gates of Hell, which was to serve as a monumental portal for the new museum of decorative arts in Paris. The massive work, nearly seven metres high and seething with humanity, was never finished to the artist’s satisfaction, but parts of it, including The Thinker (originally envisaged as a figure of Dante), were eventually finished separately on an even larger scale. The pose–hand propping chin, elbow rested on knee–may be over-familiar now, but the sculpture still has the power to rise above parody. The figure leans forward impossibly far. The cantilever–which would have been still more dramatic viewed from below as you passed under the lintel of the museum doorway–is crucial to Rodin’s achievement. This static lump of bronze is animated even by Rodin’s usual standard, producing not an outward appearance of movement as sculptors often sought to do, but a projection of internal activity. It urgently wants us to know something, to know in fact the very power of thought. Recent X-ray studies have shown that the sculpture is only able to do this to such an extraordinary degree because it conceals within its base a massive counterweight made of lead.

  Lead is the reification of gravity, both physical and intellectual, and is the chemical element most closely associated with death itself. When we speak of a leaden sky, it is not only the colour we mean: the gravitational impossibility of the image presages worse than rain–the doom of a world turned upside down. Lead sarcophagi are traditionally used to preserve the bodies of popes and kings to ensure that the soul does not escape. The heart of the king of Scots Robert the Bruce rests in a lead casket at Melrose Abbey, as does the lanky body of his foe, the English King Edward I, at Westminster. The ‘Hammer of the Scots’ instructed that the casket
was to be exchanged for regal gold only upon the final defeat of Scotland; the lead casket remains to this day.

  Lead does not corrode, and so preserves what it contains, because it forms a surface layer which blocks further chemical attack. It is this thin layer–the same substance as artists’ lead white–which ultimately preserves the roofs of many of the cathedrals and churches of Europe as well as the bodies of their prelates. This compound also robs the metal of what little lustre it has when fresh cut, leaving it an elephant-grey that hardly reflects sunlight. This, too, seems to render lead more suitable than others for rituals of death and burial.

  Lead’s weighty relationship with gravity and its connotations of the ultimate collapse–into the tomb–are but the most extreme of its various associations with fate and falling. When we agree to leave a matter to chance, we let the chips ‘fall where they may’, governed not by us but solely by the laws of physics. One of the secondary meanings of the German noun Fall is simply ‘event’, something that happens or befalls. And a fall gains emphasis if what falls does so heavily. A heavy fall is decisive. For this reason the Romans made dice out of lead.