William Champion

Who was William Champion?

William Champion is credited with patenting a process in Great Britain to distill zinc metal from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.

Champion came from a family who were already concerned in the metal trade at Bristol, his father being a leading partner in the Bristol Brass Company. As a young man he toured Europe, returning in 1730. He then experimented with smelting calamine, developing a method very similar to those long in use at the Zawar mines in India, but no mechanism for technology transfer has yet been established. The difficulty is that a temperature of 1000°C is needed to reduce zinc oxide to zinc, but zinc vaporises at 907°C. It is thus necessary for the furnace to provide a means of condensing the vapour. He obtained a patent for the process in 1738, but the process was energy inefficient. The distillation process produced around 400 kg of zinc per charge from six crucibles located in the furnace. The zinc was collected by iron tubes into water.

His initial works were on Old Market in Bristol and he made 200 tons of spelter by 1742, when he was required to move because his premises were a 'common nuisance'. In 1746, he formed a partnership with fellow Quakers, including Thomas Goldney and Sampson Lloyd the Birmingham ironmonger and set up works at Warmley, creating a large reservoir to power battery works, wire mills and rolling mills. In 1750 he sought an extension of his patent, but this was opposed. By 1754, he had: