Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts

> Cymbals and bells had been made of bronze for centuries; the formula of eight parts of copper to two parts of tin was well known, but at some point Avedis stumbled upon a process of making a bronze alloy which held its strength and temper even when hammered and worked to a previously unimaginable thinness. The technique he discovered allowed cymbals to be made which had a distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved. The bronze alloy itself was no mystery, but the mixing process, the method of combining the metals in molten form to create the castings from which the cymbals was made, was a secret held only by Avedis. The resulting cymbals, said to contain traces of gold or silver, must have pleased the Sultan enough to commission Avedis to make cymbals for the Janissaries, the superior fighting forces of the Ottomans. The music of the Janissary bands relied profoundly on the striking of the cymbals, and Avedis became the official supplier to the Sultan.

Bells ring when you hit them, but cymbals have a thin bow which vibrates wildly and crashes when hit. It's a radically different sound, and apparently a radically different physical behaviour, though I don't understand the physics. So what I suspect happened was this: thick-walled, bell-like zils had long been manufactured in Constantinople, in various different sizes. But Avedis I's alloy turned out to be (again, I assume) the first (at least in the Middle East or Europe) to allow zils to be made thin enough to crash like a cymbal, not just ring like a bell. This is presumably what the talk about "distinct purity of tone that no other cymbal had ever achieved" actually refers to. Since making thin-bowed cymbals is apparently a very tricky procedure which involves subjecting the blank to high pressure and high temperature at the same time, it seems plausible that Avedis' accidental breakthrough in metallurgy was necessary to make this possible. (OTOH maybe his real breakthrough was in that cymbal-making process; maybe his special recipe for the blanks was in fact less necessary than he realised, even?) A leap from ringing bell-like zills to crashing cymbals would be the kind of thing which could be dramatic enough to get the sultan to notice and to hand out a title, a trade monopoly and a cash prize. If the crash was a new sound, it must have seemed absolutely otherworldly at the time. (However I don't know when China started making crashing cymbals, whether some crashing cymbals from China might have made it to Constantinople by the early 1600s, and so on.)

It's a day's work in the right spectroscopy lab. A bit more difficult to figure out is how to turn the cast blank into a cymbal.

And, finding a place in a mature market.

It isn’t just in the US that there are weird beasts. In Australia, there is this union called the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA). They are the main union for retail and fast food employees. The employers like them because they are rather moderate and keen to reach “understandings”, plus they will fight hard to keep more radical unions off their turf. Employers would even encourage their employees to join it. For many years they were controlled by socially conservative Roman Catholics, who used the union as a political and financial base to oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, IVF, etc, despite the fact those most of their members (who skew younger and the clear majority of whom aren’t Catholic) didn’t share those views and didn’t realise their union dues were paying for views they probably didn’t share. It is only in the last decade or so that the tension between the leadership and the membership over social issues got to the point that the leadership realised they had to move to neutrality or risk losing control of the union, so they did what they had to do

Which is an interesting perspective in its own way, as for example when Volkswagen came to the US, they demanded that employees unionize as they felt it would allow greater stability by having content employees and a single entity to negotiate with.

Unions cause cost and bargaining.

If all you want is simplicity, stability and throwing money at the problem, instead of dealing with each of your employee's individual asks and try to gauge what's the most common complaint, you deal with a single entity.

Now I'm sure the US have a ton more baggage regarding unions, but we'd then come down to feelings and history, more than arguable reasons.

There's a good reason why Reza Pahlavi's move to rename Persia (itself a foreign-derived name) to the original name of Eran/Iran was extremely popular amongst the Iranians.

They moved the business to the US before the genocide though (and in good time too!), so not sure how they would have been affected.

I suppose that the cymbals makers just cut their models more thinly.

Sounds like there was some truth in what your mom said?

So this is arguably the original company.