It makes sense though as "-ian" implies there was a "Zildji" before the brand existed. :)

The catch, though, is that ambiguity between 'cymbal-maker' and 'bell-maker'. 'Zil's certainly existed before the surname existed, but what was a zil/zill? In English 'zill' still usually refers to something like a 'finger cymbal' or crotal, something with thicker bell-like walls and a bell-like sound and vibration. Unfortunately everything I've read about this is suggestive but maddeningly vague, for example p. 8 https://books.google.ie/books?redir_esc=y&id=Fl6Ie0_Rt8cC&q=... of the official history, Zildjian: A History of the Legendary Cymbal Makers by Jon Cohan (ISBN 9780793591558 ):

> 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.)

In his memoir "The Black Dog of Fate" Peter Balakian gives a breakdown like this for a relative branch of the family named Shekerlemejian: "şeker" is Turkish for "sugar" and "şekerleme" is "things made with sugar" so a candy seller got an occupational name and then their child got the patronymic form.

All of this to say: there's an n=1 elsewhere for this happening to Ottoman Armenians.

Sounds like the word came first, then the cymbals, then the word-as-name.

It's not a Crapper situation where cymbals are named after this guy

"Crapper" as slang for a toilet has an attestation from before Thomas Crapper was a plumber, so if that's what you were referring to, then it's also not a case where it was named after the guy.

So poor Thomas was a victim of nominative determinism?

Mostly. He made significant improvements to the toilet (they already existed). And his last name was then forever destined be the butt (...) of jokes.

>> forever destined be the butt (...) of jokes.

Just like Uranus (and everybody else's)

I wonder if anyone's bothered to assay their alloy to reverse engineer it.

It's B20 bronze (80% copper, 20% tin).

Robert Zildjian explained it's not the formula that's the secret, but the process for manufacturing cymbals without cracking since B20 is so brittle.

I'd be shocked if they hadn't. Particularly, cymbal makers who have already mapped out the other parts of the process. In fact they may already be using the same or similar alloys. Consider that violins are all made from approximately the same materials.

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.

The "How it's Made" for cymbals is a Zildjian factory. By the time this was made, there were already many competitors, so I doubt anything in the video wasn't already replicated by Sabian, Paiste, etc., but it's still interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYGRcbKOt4U

Italians also got into cymbal-making during the 20th century, the upshot of which was apparently that some of the post-WWII British cymbals branded as "Zyn" were made by Italian POWs (or maybe ex-POWs?)

Interestingly, Sabian is the same family as Zildjian. I believe the owners at the time of separation were brothers Robert (who separated out the Sabian line in Canada naming it after his children) and Armand who took the Zildjian line in Massachusetts.

There is a rich tradition of secret sauce Armenian-American businesses splitting in half in this way. Zankou Chicken forked, for instance, however much more acrimoniously.

So he did manage to turn copper and tin into gold, just indirectly ;) Alchemy vindicated, at last!