# Help with an alloy



## aj47 (May 17, 2014)

I'm not sure how to find out what metals were known, but uncommon in the 1830's.  Not necessarily *expensive* or *rare* but not really common. I'm inventing an alloy with special properties, but since these properties cannot exist in real life, I can't just look up in a metallurgy handbook.  Besides using the years of discovery and their place on the periodic table to know if they're metals ... how can I find such a metal. Or does it have to be a metal? I mean, carbon goes into steel and it's not a metal.  Or is it?  I get confused easily.

Oh I don't even know now what I want.  <sigh>  Some element I can put in an alloy that is historically plausible for an 1830 French inventor to create/use but that isn't just lying about for everyone to have/use.   

If you know of some reasonable resources I could find online, that could help me, I'd appreciate a link/pointer. This is *so* not my area of expertise.


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## Blade (May 17, 2014)

astroannie said:


> Oh I don't even know now what I want.  <sigh>  Some element I can put in an alloy that is historically plausible for an 1830 French inventor to create/use but that isn't just lying about for everyone to have/use.



Located in the year 1830 you are pretty well stuck with Iron and whatever alloys could have been manufactured at the time. Aluminum was very rare at that time (being once more valuable than Gold) and did not come into commercial production until the 1880's when large scale electrical generation and a process for breaking down Bauxite became available.

If you wanted to imagine some thing up I guess you would be free to go ahead but plain 'wrought iron' was widely in use as it was easy to manufacture and manipulate though very prone to corrosion. The first streetcars in London UK were pulled by horses and ran on cast iron tracks. It took many years of experimentation and trial and error to come up with harder, and more rust resistant products but they couldn't really be considered magical but just more useful and better adapted to certain needs.

Non-metals like Carbon can, and are, added to metals in alloys but only as a minor component to achieve a specific effect.


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## aj47 (May 18, 2014)

Thank you.  Looking at a chart of discovery, cesium, yttrium, and a bunch of other weird stuff was discovered in the 18th century, well before my French inventor's time.  I don't need to ever name it I don't think -- I can refer to the alloy either generically as "an alloy" or by a made-up name for it.  Which I'm leaning toward dichronium.  It's just that I'm weird in wanting to *know* and since it isn't real, I have to concoct it.


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## Cran (May 18, 2014)

It might help to know what you want this alloy to do; what properties it should ideally have. 

In metallurgy, alloys often included non-metals (carbon, sulfur, silicon, even some gases) to provide particular properties, and some were known although not common as long as history itself. For example, common iron and steel production didn't happen until the Iron Age, but the use of iron alloys predates writing when the only iron known was in fact an alloy of iron and sulfur (troilite) that fell from the sky and was considered a gift from the gods. 

A weaker version - the slightly magnetic pyrrhotite - was found near vents to the underworld. The lumps that fell from the sky were unusual because they never rusted, and therefore made superior weapons - legendary weapons, considering the opponents were stuck with copper or bronze for the most part. 

When Mendeleev showed us how to organise elements into a periodic table, there was an entire column he didn't know about at first - the noble gases. He was too young to be of help to your French inventor, but he started out working with common colouring agents for glassmaking. 

The very old (as in started in the 1300s) feldspar mine on a tiny island in Sweden produced some really strange lumps of stuff - rare earths - that took a long time to tease out into seven separate elements, four of which are named after the village near the mine - Ytterby. 

Even after these strange gaps were filled, there remained one spot within the table for which an example could never be found, and eventually had to be produced in a laboratory - technetium. 

Radium - that strange glowing blue element - was officially discovered in the late 19th Century by a French couple, but the common source of it, and the other heavy radioactive elements (including the noble gas, radon) was fairly widely known for over a century for its odd properties - pitchblende. 

Eventually, a sample of pitchblende proved that even transuranic elements occasionally turn up naturally, when minute amounts of plutonium were discovered after we'd already learned how to produce it in a breeder reactor. 

One that fits the time is beryllium, an amazing metal first produced in 1828 by a German chemist. Products made from beryllium alloys are prized for their lightness, strength and durability - today, they feature in aerospace engineering. Beryllium is almost transparent to x-rays, and has a definite sweet taste - but I wouldn't recommend testing that; it's highly toxic - which makes it an ideal assassin's weapon.

ETA: _dichronium_ would be an element - the alloy would be _dichronite_


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## aj47 (May 18, 2014)

Thanks Cran.  Dichronite, when exposed to concentrated UV radiation creates an achronositc field where whatever is in it can port through time.

I'm a bit hazy on the control mechanism for this -- there may not be one.  The thing is, one can't go back in time before there's a mechanism to be pulled out of the timestream and an achronistic field would provide that.  So basically, my inventor has half a time machine.  The catching out of the timestream half.  Not the sending you forward back to your own time half.

How it works is he focuses UV from the sun onto a parabolic mirror than sends a beam to the dichronite disk on the floor (which fluoresces so he can tell that it's focused ... impurities in the alloy).


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## Cran (May 18, 2014)

astroannie said:


> Thanks Cran.  Dichronite, when exposed to concentrated UV radiation creates an achronositc field where whatever is in it can port through time.
> 
> I'm a bit hazy on the control mechanism for this -- there may not be one.  The thing is, one can't go back in time before there's a mechanism to be pulled out of the timestream and an achronistic field would provide that.  So basically, my inventor has half a time machine.  The catching out of the timestream half.  Not the sending you forward back to your own time half.
> 
> How it works is he focuses UV from the sun onto a parabolic mirror than sends a beam to the dichronite disk on the floor (which fluoresces so he can tell that it's focused ... impurities in the alloy).


Sounds something like early delving into hypothetical physics; dichronite would be an alloy which is sensitive to and/or affects the flows of chronons, luxons, and tachyons (the first a hypothesised fundamental particle of time, the second a class of particles that only exist at the velocity of light, and the third which can only exist in faster-than-light environments - considered necessary for time travel). 

Whilst many naturally occurring minerals fluoresce in UV light, and could therefore provide the marker impurities, the key element(s) that make dichronite temporally potent are probably best sourced via meteorites that originated outside of our solar system.  

That way you get material that is quite rare but easy to access -either by chance sighting of a fall, or by rumours/myths of out of the way places where strange things seem to happen to local time on sunny days - and which have undergone some extreme conditions which could not occur in normal planetary or stellar formation; eg, neutronium, a theoretical element with no protons, only neutrons, formed in the core of post-nova neutron star with too much mass to remain a white dwarf but not enough to become a black hole. 

The only way I can think of that would produce neutronium seeds is a neutron binary in collision - the bulk of material would coalesce into a new black hole, but some may be broken up and blown out in the impact. These neutronium seeds would move through space, absorbing lots of forms of radiation and large particles - elements and compounds found in planetary nebulae. Over time, the force and heat of these minor impacts would forge the alloy, dichronite, and reduce the velocity of the meteor sufficiently to fall to Earth without punching a hole through the crust. 

As a meteorite, it would be surprisingly heavy for its size, but otherwise unremarkable to look at.


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## aj47 (May 18, 2014)

Okay, he needs to have a way to cast it into a disk.  Or a metalworking friend to do it for him (probably the latter). hmmmm.


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## Cran (May 18, 2014)

The disc itself could be of any host material you desire*; the dichronite seeds could be minute inclusions - think iron filings or industrial diamond powder - extracted from the unusual host meteorite.

_*possibly including the newly discovered beryllium to offset the weight but retain the strength. _


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## aj47 (May 18, 2014)

Okay, got it. It fell from the sky.


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## aj47 (May 18, 2014)

And the French word for it is "meteorite" with accents over some of the vowels.  I was hoping for a more obscure word.


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## Cran (May 18, 2014)

astroannie said:


> And the French word for it is "meteorite" with accents over some of the vowels.  I was hoping for a more obscure word.


Ah well, my French is limited to the words I have to ask pardon for. The only less common term that a scientist would use is bolide.


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