A Bronze Age idea with pandemic-era relevance
This ore has had its metal tested and come through with flying colours, mostly orange-red.
Copper, which transitioned humankind between Stone and Bronze ages, has a long track record as an antimicrobial used to battle bacteria, viruses and fungi throughout history.
It’s fitting, then, that during this time of novel coronavirus the Britannia Mine Museum is launching a summer exhibit called “Copper: Bug Buster,” about how the ore took on superbugs and other diseases through the ages.
“It kind of came about by scrolling through the news about COVID -19 back in April and there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine about how long the virus lasted on surfaces,” curator Diane Mitchell said.
It turns out SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, lasts just four hours on copper surfaces, two days on stainless steel and three days on plastic, Mitchell discovered.
“When I saw that, I thought ‘Ooh, this is really interesting.’”
So she began digging and found references dating back to ancient Egypt about the use of copper in treating various ailments. And since Britannia was a copper mine ..“The more I discovered, the more I thought this would make a neat little summer exhibit.”
The mine museum reopened in June, with physical distancing and disinfecting practices in place. That goes for the copper exhibit, housed in the spacious machine shop, as well as the underground tour (the train and hard hats are sterilized after every tour), mineral gallery and BOOM!, a new light, sound and special effects show.
While a normal summer might see 80,000 visitors, the museum estimates there will be 20,000 this summer, executive director Kirstin Clausen said.
“We pride ourselves in providing visitors with insightful educational experiences and we felt it was important for this year’s temporary exhibit to reflect on the current COVID-19 pandemic given how much it has impacted our lives,” she said.
Copper has the atomic number 29, is symbolized as Cu and you probably have heard it’s handy in electrical equipment and plumbing.
What you may not have heard is its medicinal applications.
Folks in Mesopotamia about 5,500 years ago discovered how to make copper for weapons, tools and jewelry. Today copper is used as a conductor of heat and as wiring, as a building material, as an alloy in sterling silver, and of course in the penny nobody misses.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus, written between 2600 and 2200 BCE in Egypt — making it the oldest known surgical essay on trauma — says copper was used to sterilize drinking water, curator Mitchell said. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical papyrus circa 1500 BC, recommended copper for a variety of ailments.
Some of the other things the Britannia exhibit will focus on are: Incas disinfected wounds with gauze soaked in copper-sulphate solution; Aztecs gargled with a copper solution to treat sore throats; ancient Greeks used copper bracelets for arthritis; in ancient Rome Pliny the Elder listed 150 copper-based remedies.
“We don’t have proof of how much they all worked,” curator Mitchell said, but the fact copper was used to treat maladies by the Incas to the Aztecs to ancient Rome, Greece, India, China and Egypt she finds fascinating.
In modern times, research has shown that when a virus or bacteria lands on copper, the metal releases electrically charged particles that destroy cell membranes, then the DNA and RNA inside.
There are myriad studies showing copper alloy surfaces have properties that destroy a whole whack of micro-organisms, including E. coli, MRSA, C. difficile, influenza A virus and adenovirus, to name a few.
The copper exhibit runs July 18 to Sept. 13, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The Britannia Mine Museum asks you to pre-book tickets online because of COVID-19 crowd restrictions.