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Book IX artificially coloring of metals such as gold, silver, copper

Book IX artificially coloring of metals such as gold, silver, copper Page of 251 Book IX artificially coloring of metals such as gold, silver, copper Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
188
DE NATURA FOSSILIUM
Two ounces of artificial white arsenic and an equal amount of halinitrum are placed in an earthenware flask and sealed, after which it is placed on a charcoal fire and heated for an hour to allow complete mixing. One-half ounce of this powder, one-half ounce of sublimate of mercury and one-fourth ounce of argol that has been reduced to a powder over a fire are mixed together. Then molten copper is allowed to flow into a silver­smith's crucible that has been prepared for it. The rest of the powdered arsenic and halinitrum are thrown into the copper and it is stirred rapidly with a rod until purified. When this is completed one part of the second powder is added to four parts of the purified copper and thoroughly mixed. Finally the copper is poured into honey and allowed to cool. This produces white copper.
Iron also can be tinted an alien color. It can be made the color of copper when covered with acid and alumen or atramentum sutorium. There is nothing extraordinary about this.2 At Smolensk, a town in the Carpath­ian mountians in that part of Hungary that was called Dacia at one time, water is taken from a certain pit and poured into canals that are grouped in series of three. Pieces of iron laid along these canals are turned into copper.3 Very small pieces of iron that are placed at the ends of the canals are eaten by the water in such a fashion as to give the iron a yellowish color. This copper is refined in a furnace. Water similar to that men­tioned above also drops from veins filled with minerals that are joined by a natural relationship to atramentum sutorium and from which the latter is produced as I have mentioned elsewhere. Old water that has been used to part silver from gold changes iron into copper because it is made from atramentum sutorium. Artisans can cover a base metal with a precious meta) so that the object made from the base meta) becomes beautiful ana pleasing. In this manner copper, silver, brass and iron are gold plated and copper and brass silver plated. In the same manner iron is plated with silver and stannum and especially with stannum argentarium and tin. The methods by which these valuable objects are produced should be mentioned.
Silver is gold plated by three methods. Gold foil may be placed on thin sheets of silver and hammered until the two metals are firmly bonded. Another method is to take a piece of silver about three-quarters of an inch thick and weighing about four ounces and place on it two denarii of gold and then beat the two metals until they are flattened very thin. Objects made from these gold plated sheets are worth more than double the price of the same object made from gold since the gold is not worn away so rapidly through use.4 These gold plated silver sheets are used to make the gold and silver leaves placed as ornaments on the silk nets worn by women and which sparkle so brilliantly when the head is turned. Oblong and circu-
2 A method of crude copper plating.
3 This method of precipitating copper from mine waters is widely used today.
4  This alloy would correspond, roughly, to seventeen carat gold.
Book IX artificially coloring of metals such as gold, silver, copper Page of 251 Book IX artificially coloring of metals such as gold, silver, copper
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