The repetitive clink of ball peen hammers working large copper sheets echoes off every surface in the shop. With a hammer in each hand, the goal is to never hit the same place twice. Multiple passes are taken down the length of the sheet, each pass followed with a series of annealing and flattening.
Hammering copper is one of the oldest methods of humans forming metal. Copper tools and smelting operations have been found dating to 6500 B.C. The Pantheon, originally constructed in 27 B.C., had a copper roof covering the outer skin of the main dome, which remained in service up to the beginning of WWII. Being the first to use metal as a major architectural material, the Romans made sheets using sand castings and finished by hammered them to thin copper panels of various sizes. Copper has been recycled for thousands of years and has the highest recycling rate of any engineering material.
Each swing of the hammer develops a better understanding of the material, and seems to provoke the history contained in that piece of copper. How many lives has this copper previously experienced as a tool, a vessel, a piece of jewelry, or worshiped as a gift from the gods? I can’t help but wonder if one of my Italian ancestors, a few centuries ago, worked some small part of copper that makes up the spot that I just hammered.
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