Nickel silver, also known as German silver, Argentan, new silver, nickel brass, albata, alpacca, or electrum, is a copper alloy with nickel and often zinc. The usual formulation is 60% copper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. Nickel silver is named for its silvery appearance, but it contains no elemental silver unless plated. The name "German silver" refers to its development by 19th-century German metalworkers in imitation of the Chinese alloy known as paktong (Cupronickel) All modern, commercially important nickel silvers (such as those standardized under ASTM B122) contain significant amounts of zinc, and are sometimes considered a subset of brass.
Read more about Nickel Silver: Uses, Toxicity, History, Fraudulent Uses
Famous quotes containing the words nickel and/or silver:
“Castro couldn’t even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“There is probably not more than one hundred dollars in cash in circulation today. That is, if you were to call in all the bills and silver and gold in the country at noon tomorrow and pile them on the table, you would find that you had just about one hundred dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and a few peppermint Life Savers.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)