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
Metallic fiber (steel wool), bundle drawn from larger diameter wire (smallest fiber is produced by this method), cast from molten metal, or grown around a seed (often carbon). Bundle drawn metal fiber can be produced to sizes smaller than one micrometre in diameter. Currently metallic fibers are manufactured primarily in Europe with only three manufacturers still producing metallic yarn in the United States. Metlon Corporation is one of the remaining manufacturers in the U.S. that stocks a wide variety of laminated and non-laminated metallic yarns & Brightex Corporation, Japan and South Korea, such as Hwa Young, is also manufacturing Metallic fibers. China