SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The British team used the XMaS (X-ray Materials Science) beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, to examine the surface chemistry of the links. Synchrotron radiation is a thin beam of very high-intensity X-rays generated within a particle accelerator. Electrons are fired into a linear accelerator to boost their speeds and then injected into a storage ring. They zoom through the ring at near-light speed, as a series of magnets bend and focus the electrons. In the process, they give off X-rays, which can then be focused down beamlines.

This is useful for analyzing structure, because in general, the shorter the wavelength used (and the higher the energy of the light), the finer the details one can image and/or analyze. The team found that the links were made from an alloy that was 73-percent copper and 27-percent zinc. According to co-author Mark Dowsett, emeritus professor at the University of Warwick, this is "quite a modern alloy composition," but what was surprising was the level of control.

"We had three completely different samples, and the analysis was the same," he told Ars. One sample had been thoroughly cleaned, but the others had not, and thus still had a corrosive layer. Yet all three showed the same composition ratios. This suggests that Tudor England was fairly advanced in brass production and techniques like wire drawing.

The analysis also revealed heavy metal traces, including lead and gold, on the surface of the links. According to Dowsett, it's possible many of those traces came later, since during World War II, the Portsmouth Dockyard was the target of heavy bombing, depositing lead, mercury, and cadmium, for instance, into the Solent waters. "You can imagine that the armor sank to the bottom of the sea and gradually corroded, and then it picked up the stuff from the seafloor afterwards," Dowsett said. Alternatively, the lead may have been from dust produced by the lead balls used in 16th-century scatter guns and pistols.

As for the gold, traces were only found on one set of links, and he thinks it likely came from the tooling when the armor was made, rather than mixed into the brass alloy. "Gold is very soluble in brass, so if you added gold to the alloy, you would never see it as a separate material," he said. "We saw crystalline gold. That tells you there are pure gold particles on the surface that presumably came from tooling used to work the pieces the armor was made from."

Journal Reference:
M. G. Dowsett, P.-J. Sabbe, J. Alves Anjos, et al. "Synchrotron X-ray diffraction investigation of the surface condition of artefacts from King Henry VIII's warship the Mary Rose", Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, 2020. 10.1107/S1600577520001812

Original Submission