So far, books and periodicals published at home and abroad, especially Western chemistry books, all use the same formulation, that is, zinc was first discovered by the German Margraf in 1746. Actually this is wrong. More than a hundred years before Magraf, the Chinese people had discovered zinc and mastered its smelting method. Tiangong Kaiwu, compiled by Song Yingxing in 1637, is the world's first encyclopedia on agriculture and handicrafts. It describes the process of zinc smelting in detail: "Fanlou lead is not found in ancient books, but it is a name and color established in modern times. Its quality is made from calamine and is widely produced in the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi, followed by Jing and Heng. . Seal the clay and grind it to dry gradually to prevent it from breaking apart when exposed to fire. Then put it in layer by layer with coal cakes, lay firewood on the bottom, and heat it up to make it red. The calamine in the jar will melt into a ball and cool down to destroy the jar. "Take it out." "There is no copper in this material, and it will fly away in smoke. It is like lead and has strong properties, so it is called Rijun lead." The calamine mentioned here is zinc carbonate. Floor lead is zinc. The principle is that zinc carbonate decomposes under heat in the tank to form zinc oxide, which reacts with the carbon in the "briquette" to be reduced to zinc. The smelting of zinc is relatively difficult because the temperature at which zinc oxide is reduced to zinc (above 10 0 0 ℃) is higher than the boiling point of zinc (50 7 7). If the temperature is not controlled enough or the sealing is not tight, it will be difficult to produce a large amount of zinc. Metal. "Yogong Kaiwu" records that the lead of the building does not combine with the copper, "Human fire will turn into smoke and go away", which is also completely correct. The description of zinc smelting in "Tiangong Kaiwu" is not only detailed in text, but also illustrated. This also shows that the discovery of zinc in China was actually much earlier than 1637. Europeans didn't know that zinc was a metal until the 16th century, and they didn't know until the 17th century that zinc could be smelted from smithsonite. However, they never mastered the smelting method of zinc and imported zinc from China for a long time until the 1730s. , British talents learned the zinc smelting method from China. The German who claimed to be the first to discover zinc, Margraf, discovered zinc as late as 1746.
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