Calamine (mineral) enough was known of metallic zinc to make brass solder directly by combining copper and spelter (zinc ingots). In 1738 a patent was granted to William Champion, a Bristol brass founder, for the large-scale reduction of calamine to produce spelter. In 1684 a paper presented to the Royal Society touched on the medicinal and veterinary properties of the compound when in finely powdered form. Calamine (mineral) Calamine is a historic name for an ore of zinc. The name "calamine" was derived from "lapis calaminaris", a Latin corruption of Greek "cadmia (καδμία)", the old name for zinc ores in general. The
Period 7 element has a half-life of 1601 years and decays into radon gas. Because of such instability, radium is luminescent, glowing a faint blue. Radium, in the form of radium chloride, was discovered by Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and published the discovery at the French Academy of Sciences five days later. Radium was isolated in its metallic state by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the electrolysis of radium chloride in 1910. Since its discovery, it has given names such as radium A and radium C to several isotopes of other elements