William Champion (metallurgist)

William Champion (1709–1789) is credited with patenting a process in Great Britain to distill zinc metal from calamine using charcoal in a smelter.

After Abraham Darby I had left the Bristol Brass Company to form his own new copper works at Coalbrookdale, fellow Quaker Nehemiah Champion took over leadership. Nehemiah had three sons: John (1705–1794); Nehemiah (1709–1782); and the youngest William (1710–1789).

As a young man, William Champion toured Europe to learn the art of brass making, returning to become a junior partner in the Bristol Brass Company in 1730. He then experimented for six years to develop a process to create zinc – then known as spelter. Using a scaled-up process similar to that used at the Zawar mines in India where this process was available centuries before William Champion rediscovered it, since the 12th century AD, he overcame the difficulties of zinc vaporising at 907 °C by introducing a condensing vapour into the process through distillation. He obtained a patent for his method in July 1738, and his system remained in production for over 100 years.

Under the Bristol Brass Company, from 1738 within works established at the Old Market, by September 1742 he had produced 400 kilograms (880 lb) of zinc per charge from six crucibles located in the furnace, at a cost of around £7,000. However, he had now created two sets of enemies:

In 1742 father Nehemiah – a widower – married a widow, Martha Vandewall, the sister of Thomas Goldney III. The Goldney family owned land in Warmley, and in 1746 backed by the Goldney family, William left the Bristol Brass Company and began to construct the Warmley Works. With tools and manufacturing equipment supplied by the Darby Ironworks at Coalbrookdale, over the next few years Warmley Works became the biggest metal processing plant in the world, with outputs of zinc, copper, brass and other metals. After the death of his father in 1747, William was joined in the business by his brother Nehemiah, and sister Rachael as a shareholder.

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