The first metal worked by human hands — soft enough to shape without smelting, abundant enough to spread across cultures, and the base element of bronze — whose adoption reorganized human labor, warfare, and trade across the ancient world and whose descendants still wire the electrical infrastructure of the modern one.
Copper was the first metal. Before iron, before steel, before bronze, there was copper — available at the surface, malleable with stone tools, and immediately useful. The ten thousand years since its first working trace a line from Neolithic craftsmen hammering nuggets into beads to the copper wiring that carries electricity through every building on earth.