[Bell Historians] Arsenic in bell metal

[Dickon Love]

Robin Shipp:

"We have just replaced the old Bilbie 8th at Redcliffe with a new Taylor
bell. The old bell was out of tune with itself, as demonstrated by Bill
Hibbert, but there is a story going around now that another reason it
sounded bad was that there was arsenic in the bell metal. The presence of
arsenic would not be unusual, as some copper ores contain arsenic, and I
believe that some archealogical artifacts are made of 'arsenical bronze'.
But I find it hard to believe that would affect the tuning of the bell
although if there was enough to affect the internal damping I suppose it
would affect the resonance, if that's the right word.
Does anyone have any experience of this in other bells?"

The old bells at Tunstall (1843) were 0.637% Arsenic.  Modern metal, I
understand, can expect something in the region of 0.002% of the element.
One would expect there to be more lead present.  The old Tunstall bells were
pretty poor, unhelped by disasterous retuning in 1975, but I am not sure the
arsenic was to blame, and suspect that this is pretty typical for bells at
that time. Antimony and Sulphur are also detectable elements. Others may
know better.

DrL