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Copper Is Self-Sanitising
Leave bacteria on a copper surface and come back in two hours — they'll be dead. This isn't a modern discovery: Hindu texts from approximately 2000 BCE recommend storing water in copper containers for health reasons. Medieval surgeons used copper compounds to treat wounds. Sailors noticed copper-bottomed ships resisted marine growth better than other vessels. Everyone intuited the effect for millennia before the science was understood.
Octopus Blood Really Is Blue
Human blood is red because it uses iron-containing haemoglobin to carry oxygen. Octopuses, squid, and most crustaceans use copper-containing haemocyanin instead, which appears blue when oxygenated. This is not a metaphor or a simplified description — cephalopod blood is genuinely blue. The copper makes it blue in precisely the same way that the iron makes human blood red.
The Penny Hasn't Been Copper Since 1982
The US one-cent coin was made from solid copper until 1982, when copper prices made a copper penny worth more than one cent in raw material. Since then, pennies have been 97.5% zinc with a thin copper plating. The Canadian penny — before Canada eliminated it entirely in 2013 — went through a similar transition. Both countries essentially admitted that their copper coins were no longer copper.
Copper Can Technically Be Grown
In a process called electroplating, copper can be deposited atom by atom from a copper solution onto any conductive surface using electrical current. Electroformed copper — copper objects grown atom by atom onto a form, which is then removed — can be used to create extremely precise copper structures. This is how the copper circuitry on printed circuit boards is created.
Lightning Rods Are Copper
The standard lightning rod — the pointed metal spike Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1752 to protect buildings from lightning — is typically made from copper or copper-clad materials. Copper's high conductivity makes it ideal for safely conducting the enormous electrical current of a lightning strike from the building's peak to a ground electrode. The same property that makes copper ideal for regular electrical wiring makes it ideal for emergency high-current discharge.
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