copper is a pleasing metal
-F
@nautilee Makes lots of good colors when reacted with stuff too, like copper (II) sulfate is a great blue color and copper (I) compounds are various shades of bluish-green
-F
yeah!!! second best blue after Cobalt
@Felthry copper is pupy and i think it's neat that it's used often in wiring
@xenon the only real negative thing about its use for wiring is the fact that its conductivity plummets when you try to alloy it with stuff to make it have better mechanical properties
brass is like a quarter the conductivity of copper, and bronze even lower, and even beryllium copper is really low conductivity
tellurium copper is about the only one that maintains most of the conductivity but it's really expensive and not *that* much better mechanically
-F
@xenon fortunately if you need highly conductive material but stronger than copper, aluminum is there to support it
-F
@xenon (but aluminum has its own problems--it's notoriously unreliable to make electrical contact to it, for instance, and high-contact-resistance crimps caused more than a few house fires back when aluminum was the norm for house wiring--it's not used for house wiring anymore as a result)
-F
@Felthry Oh yes. My wife and I did a tour of the copper mining country in Michigan's upper peninsula two years ago and it was just wonderful seeing, in ore and raw and refined forms.
@Felthry
it really is. It's also got one of the best colors