Calamine brass slowly phased out as zinc smelting techniques were developed in Europe, which produced metallic zinc more suitable for brass production than calamine. However, the conversion away from calamine brass manufacture was slow; a British patent was awarded to William Champion in 1738, but the alloying of metallic zinc and copper to produce brass was not patented until 1781 (by James Emerson), and calamine brass mills persisted in South Wales until as late as 1858. The slow diffusion of this technology was probably the result of economic factors. Calamine brass Calamine brass is brass produced by a particular alloying technique using
Period 3 element is referenced in the Bible as brimstone in English, with this name still used in several nonscientific terms. Sulfur was considered important enough to receive its own alchemical symbol. It was needed to make the best quality of black gunpowder, and the bright yellow powder was hypothesized by alchemists to contain some of the properties of gold, which they sought to synthesize from it. In 1777, Antoine Lavoisier helped convince the scientific community that sulfur was a basic element, rather than a compound. Elemental sulfur was once extracted from salt domes where it sometimes occurs in nearly pure form, but