(20 B.C. to 14 A.D.) by heating a mixture of powdered calamine, charcoal and granules of copper. Roman writers observed that coins made from orichalcum were undistinguished from gold.

Zinc in India
The production of metallic zinc was described in the Hindu book Rasarnava which was written around 1200 A.D. The fourteenth century Hindu work Rasaratnassamuchchaya describes how the new "tin-like" metal was made by indirectly heating calamine with organic matter in a covered crucible fitted with a condenser. Zinc vapor was evolved and the vapor was air cooled in the condenser located below the refractory crucible. By 1374, the Hindus had recognized that zinc was a new metal, the eighth known to man at that time, and a limited amount of commercial zinc production was underway.

At Zawar, in Rajasthan, great heaps of small retorts bear testimony to extensive zinc production from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The tubular retorts are about 25 cm long and 15 cm in diameter with walls about 1 cm thick. A small diameter tube was sealed onto the open end and the zinc vapors likely condensed in this. The retorts were closely spaced in a furnace which was probably heated with charcoal fanned by bellows. Both zinc metal and zinc oxide were produced. Zinc was used to make brass whereas the oxide was used medicinally. Over 130,000 tons of residues remain at Zawar and this represents the extraction of the equivalent of 1,000,000 tons of metallic zinc and zinc oxide.

Zinc in China
From India, zinc manufacture moved to China where it developed as an industry to supply the needs of brass manufacture. The Chinese apparently learned about zinc production sometime around 1600 A.D. An encyclopedia issued in the latter half of the sixteenth century makes no mention of zinc, but the book Tien-kong-kai-ou published early in the 17th century related a procedure for zinc manufacture. Calamine ore, mixed with powdered charcoal, was placed in clay jars and heated to evolve zinc vapor. The crucibles are piled up in a pyramid with lump coal between them, and, after being brought to redness, are cooled and broken. The metal is found in the center in the form of a round regulus. Zinc production expanded and metal began to be exported.

Zinc in Europe
Albertus Magnus (ca. 1248) described how either calamine or furnace tutty might be used to color copper gold. He suggested that a more golden luster might be obtained by sprinkling crushed glass on top of the mixture in the crucible to form a slag which would help prevent the escape of the zinc vapor; in other words, increase the zinc content of the brass.

Biringuccio (ca. 1540) has the next most complete description of brass making. He described how either calamine or furnace tutty could be mixed with broken up pieces of copper and sprinkled with a layer of powdered glass, then heated in a closed crucible for 24 hours.

Agricola in 1546 reported that a white metal was condensed and scraped off the walls of the furnace when Rammelsberg ore was smelted in the Harz Mountains to obtain lead and silver to which he gave the name "contrefey" because it was used to imitate gold. This often consisted to metallic zinc, although he did not recognize it as such. He observed, furthermore, that a similar metal called "zincum" was being produced under similar circumstances in Silesia by the local people. Paracelsus (1493-1541) was the first European to state clearly that "zincum" was a new metal and that it had properties distinct from other known metals.

Thus, by about 1600, European scientists were aware of the existence of zinc. All the metal they had examined, however, had likely been imported from the East by Portuguese, Dutch and Arab traders. However, there was a profusion of names quite unrelated to the local names for zinc ores. These included tutenag (derived from the Persian tutiya, calamine, which became the English tutty, zinc oxide) and spelter (likely from the similar colored lead-tin alloy, pewter, or the Dutch equivalent, spiauter or Indian tin which the British scientist Robert Boyle latinised to speltrum in 1690 from which originates spelter, the commercial term for zinc. The word tutia, an old name for zinc oxide, is derived from a Persian word that means smoke and refers to the fact that zinc oxide is evolved as white smoke when zinc ores are roasted with charcoal.

In an extensive research "On the method of extracting zinc from its true mineral, calamine", Andreas Marggraf in 1746 reduced calamine from Poland, England, Breslau and Hungary with carbon in closed retorts and obtained metallic zinc from all of them. He described his method in detail, thereby establishing the basic theory of zinc production. Marggraf also showed that the lead ores from Rammelsberg contained zinc and that zinc can be prepared from sphalerite. Marggraf was probably unaware that in 1742, the Swedish chemist Anton von Swab (1703-1768) had distilled zinc from calamine and that, two years later, he had even prepared it from blende. Since the vapors rose to the top of the alembic before passing into the receiver, this process was called distillation per ascendum. In 1752 Swab and another Swedish chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt (1722-1765) developed at government expense the use of Swedish zinc ores for the manufacture of brass, to avoid the necessity of importing calamine.

The knowledge of deliberate zinc smelting in a retort was acquired by an Englishman on a visit to China just prior to 1740. A vertical retort procedure was developed by William Champion (1709-1789) and by 1743 a zinc smelter had been established at Bristol in the United Kingdom. A charge of calamine and carbon was sealed into a clay crucible having a hole in the bottom. This was luted onto an iron tube extending below the crucible furnace into a cool chamber below. The closed end of the iron tube sat in a tub of water and it was here that the metallic zinc was collected (Figure 7). The distillation took a total of about 70 hours to yield 400 kg of metal from all 6 crucibles positioned in the furnace. An annual production rate of 200 tons has been suggested for the works at that time.

This type of apparatus continued to be employed until 1851 although it was fuel inefficient, consuming 24 tons of coal for every ton of spelter produced. In 1758, William's brother, John, patented the calcination of zinc sulfide to oxide for use in the retort process, thereby laying the foundation for the commercial zinc practice which continued well into the twentieth century. The English zinc industry was concentrated in Bristol and Swansea.

The excellent resistance of zinc towards atmospheric corrosion soon led to its use in sheet production. The possibility of rolling zinc was discovered as early as 1805 and the first rolling mill was built in Belgium in 1812. More such mills were built in Silesia from 1821 onwards. Hot-dip galvanizing, the oldest anticorrosion process, was introduced in 1836 in France. This became possible on an industrial scale only after the development of effective processes for cleaning iron and steel surfaces. At first, only small workpieces were zinc coated. Continuous hot-dip galvanizing of semi-finished products and wire came later. In the United States, the rich ore deposits led to rapid growth in zinc production in 1840, so that by 1907, Germany, which had for long been the world's leading producer of zinc, was left behind.

Zinc was produced for about 500 years from its oxide ores which are far less abundant than the sulfides, before the sulfides became the major source of supply. The technology of zinc production changed gradually during the centuries towards a more pyrometallurgical route. However, this tendency underwent a radical change during World War I when the roasting-leaching-electrowinning process was introduced and in the 1980's, when pressure leaching-electrowinning offered another practical route to zinc production.