Brass patented a technique for the first industrial scale distillation of metallic zinc known as "distillation per descencum" or "the English process." This local zinc was used in speltering and allowed greater control over the zinc content of brass and the production of high-zinc copper alloys which would have been difficult or impossible to produce using cementation, for use in expensive objects such as scientific instruments, clocks, brass buttons and costume jewellery. However Champion continued to use the cheaper calamine cementation method to produce lower-zinc brass and the archaeological remains of bee-hive shaped cementation furnaces have been identified at his works
Tube Alloys national leader to approve a nuclear weapons programme on 30 August 1941. The Chiefs of Staff Committee supported the decision. A directorate of Tube Alloys was established as part of Appleton's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Wallace Akers, the research director of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), was chosen as its head. Anderson and Akers came up with the name Tube Alloys. It was deliberately chosen to be meaningless, "with a specious air of probability about it". An advisory committee known as the Tube Alloys Consultative Council was created to oversee its work, chaired by Anderson, with its other