In game: Copper nickel alloy found naturally, which miners are unable to get the copper out of it. Used in weapons and coins.
Elinvar steel is a component in any golem, or clockwork. It is resistant to temperature changes giving armor made with it a +1 to +5 save vs. temperature attacks. It is not native to Oreath and is imported from worlds who know its secret.
Historically Elinvar Steel is iron nickle alloy. As nickel is near impossible to work it has magical implications.
1.1 Historical
Although elemental nickel was only discovered relatively late on, its use in alloys – without knowledge of the alloy composition – goes back at least two thousand years. This is confirmed by finds of coins from antiquity, which contain up to 10% nickel in addition to copper [2].
The most ancient Cu-Ni coin that has been saved for posterity comes
from the period around BC 235. It was found in Bactria and consists of
an alloy similar e.g. to the former German 50-Pfennig and 1 DM pieces
(approximately 75% Cu and 25% Ni). These and many other old coins are
outstanding examples for the high corrosion resistance of Cu-Ni alloys.In the Middle Ages, Saxon miners gave a mineral, from whose red colour they inferred a copper ore, the nickname ‘coppernickel’ (nickel = goblin = mountain troll). However, they would not succeed in extracting copper from it – a spell was cast on the ore by a ‘nickel’. It was only red nickel pyrites (NiAs), for the veins of ore worked in seams also incorporated copper and iron sulphides as well as arsenides.
Billon (alloy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Billon /ˈbɨlən/ is an alloy of a precious metal (most commonly silver, but also mercury) with a majority base metal content (such as copper). It is used chiefly for making coins, medals, and token coins.The word comes from the French bille, which means "log".[1]
Billon coins are perhaps best known from the Roman Empire, where progressive debasements of the Roman denarius and the Roman provincial tetradrachm in the 2nd century AD led to declining silver and increasing bronze content in these denominations of coins. Eventually, by the third quarter of the 2nd century AD, these coins were almost entirely bronze, with only a thin coating or even a wash of silver.[4]
Elinvar is a nickel steel alloy with a modulus of elasticity which does not change much with temperature changes. The name is a contraction of the French elasticité invariable (elastically invariable). It was invented in the late 1890s by Charles Édouard Guillaume, a Swiss physicist who also invented Invar, another alloy of nickel and iron, which has very low thermal expansion. Guillaume won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physics for these discoveries, which indicates how important these alloys were for scientific instruments. 