Zinc for discovering pure metallic zinc, even though Swedish chemist Anton von Swab had distilled zinc from calamine four years previously. In his 1746 experiment, Marggraf heated a mixture of calamine and charcoal in a closed vessel without copper to obtain a metal. This procedure became commercially practical by 1752. William Champion's brother, John, patented a process in 1758 for calcining zinc sulfide into an oxide usable in the retort process. Prior to this, only calamine could be used to produce zinc. In 1798, Johann Christian Ruberg improved on the smelting process by building the first horizontal retort smelter. Jean-Jacques Daniel
Bioabsorbable metallic glass numerous ternary alloys along the 350 °C isotherm of the Mg-Zn-Ca system. Ternary Ca-Mg-Zn bulk metallic glasses were also discovered in 2005. Similar to the Mg-Zn-Ca, these two amorphous alloys are both bioresorbable metallic glasses and are based on the same "Mg-Zn-Ca ternary system". The elements are displayed in order of decreasing atomic concentration. Hence, the distinction between these two metallic glasses lies in their most dominant element, namely Ca and Mg. These Ca-based bulk glassy alloys had compositions of CaMgZn, CaMgZn, and CaMgZn, where X = 0, 5 and 10; Y = 0, 5, 7.5, 10, and 15; and