Zinc

And we call her the rotten one, the wild one and the rusty scrap! About zinc ore (real and mythical)

Zinc was discovered by the Swedish chemist James Burnet in the 17th century. Interestingly, it was then mistaken for a mixture of arsenic, tin and copper. First copper, and then iron gave this metal a gray color - according to the consonance “copper princess”, and the first productions were called “zinc factories”, because they smoked the air especially diligently. In the 19th century, the technology for zinc smelting had already been created, but it was immediately very expensive: a square meter of sheet weighing 20 kilograms was estimated at a thousand dollars. It is not surprising that zinc was used only for making jewelry. Another feature: this substance was so scarce in nature that even with almost complete exhaustion of reserves, no one could really find it. British scientist Andrew Martin wrote that until the 20th century, people knew only one way to extract zinc - the so-called zone smelting.

*Fun fact