Nickel silver,
Mailechort,
German silver,
Argentan,
new silver,
nickel brass,
albata,
alpacca, or
electrum is a
copper alloy with
nickel and often
zinc. The usual formulation is 60 opper, 20% nickel and 20% zinc. Nickel silver is named for its silvery appearance, but it contains no elemental
silver unless plated. The name "German silver" refers to its development by 19th-century German metalworkers in imitation of the Chinese alloy known as
paktong (
cupronickel). All modern, commercially important nickel silvers (such as those standardized under
ASTM B122) contain significant amounts of zinc, and are sometimes considered a subset of
brass.