William Champion leads the way in the…

William Champion leads the way in the development of commercial zinc production in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Champion came from a family who were already concerned in the metal trade at Bristol, his father being a leading partner in the Bristol Brass Company.

As a young man he had toured Europe, returning in 1730.

He then experimented with smelting calamine, developing a method very similar to those long in use at the Zawar mines in India (except in scale), but no mechanism for technology transfer has yet been established.

The difficulty is that a temperature of 1000°C is needed to reduce zinc oxide to zinc, but zinc vaporizes at 907°C.

It is thus necessary for the furnace to provide a means of condensing the vapor.

He had obtained a patent for the process in 1738, but the process was energy inefficient.

The distillation process produces around four hundred kilograms of zinc per charge from six crucibles located in the furnace.

The zinc is collected by iron tubes into water.

His initial works were on Old Market in Bristol and he made two hundred tons of spelter (as zinc was then called) by 1742, when he was required to move because his premises were a 'common nuisance'.

He forms a partnership (the Warmley Company) in 1746 with fellow Quakers, including Thomas Goldney (the Bristol merchant is a partner in the Coalbrookdale Works) and Sampson Lloyd, the Birmingham ironmonger, and sets up works at Warmley, creating a large reservoir to power battery works, wire mills and rolling mills.

He seeks an extension of his patent in 1750 but this is opposed.

He has by 1754: '15 copper furnaces 12 brass furnaces; 4 spelter or zinc furnace; a battery mill or small mill for kettles; rolling mills for making plates; rolling and cutting mills for wire; and a wire mill of both thick and fine drawn kinds.