elements
Tin
Sn
- Also known as
- stannum
- Crystal system
- tetragonal
- Hardness
- 1.5–1.8 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- metallic
- Colour
- Silvery white
- Where it forms
- Native tin is extremely rare. Tin comes almost entirely from cassiterite.
- Chiefly from
- rare worldwide as native metal
Why it is that colour
Metallic. Bending a tin bar produces an audible crackle, the tin cry, as crystals inside it shear past each other.
Safety
Metallic tin is essentially non-toxic and is used for food-can linings. Organotin compounds are a different matter and tributyltin, used in ship antifouling paint, was banned internationally in 2008 after devastating marine molluscs.
Where it comes from
Mined as cassiterite, chiefly in Indonesia, Myanmar, China and Peru. Indonesian tin from Bangka has been the subject of investigation over unregulated small-scale dredging, fatal pit collapses and reef destruction. Tin is one of the 3TG conflict minerals covered by the Dodd-Frank Act reporting requirement.
Historical use
Bronze requires copper and about ten per cent tin, and tin is far rarer and far more localised than copper. That scarcity drove long-distance trade in the Bronze Age — Cornish and Anatolian tin moving across Europe and the Near East — and the collapse of those networks is one proposed factor in the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Jupiter in the alchemical scheme, associated with expansion and good fortune. Tin’s real historical importance is economic rather than symbolic — it was the scarce ingredient that made bronze possible.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Tin is the reason the Bronze Age was a trading age. Copper is widespread; tin is not, and a bronze industry needs both. Communities in the eastern Mediterranean with no tin of their own maintained supply lines running thousands of kilometres, and recent isotope work on tin ingots from Mediterranean shipwrecks has pointed to Cornish and Devon sources.
When those networks broke down around 1200 BC, bronze-dependent economies had a problem that iron eventually solved — because iron ore is everywhere, and needs nobody's trade route.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.