What elements are in a copper wire?
Copper *is* an element. .
Previous answers are from a bunch of wise guys. There are many different commerical copper alloys, actually hundreds of them, but many of these are made mostly in sheet form rather than wire. The big families of Cu allloys include at least one of the following: Zn. Sn, Ni, Ag, P, O, Fe, Al, to name a few. And. there is no such thing as an absolutely pure metal so even in Cu alloy 101 (CDA 10100: OFHC 99.99% pure) there are measurable levels of, probably, 60+ elements on the Periodic Table. One little tidbit on this subject to keep you up at night. The aluminum soda can you are drinking from has measurable levels of uranium in it. Actually, this is nothing to keep you up at night worrying about because the U content is in the parts per trillion range and the U stays in the Al. The reason we know that there is U in the Al is that we have some really good technology for analyzing very low trace amounts of U and a lot of other elements in metals. We have this technology (called Glow Discharge Mass Spectroscopy, GDMS) not because we worry about the health affects, but because even these incredibly low levels of radioactive atoms DOES affect computer chips (radioactive decay events can switch zero to one or vice versa, what is called soft errors). Hope this helps
