Zinc Metallurgical Heritage in India

Abstract

In the book devoted to a single metal, this chapter attempts to present a historical timeline as to how zinc came into our cognizance and ultimately entered many aspects of our daily life and modern living. In particular, we wish to concentrate on the developments underlying these aspects in the Indian subcontinent and neighboring areas. This is appropriate because India played a significant role in the difficult and tricky extraction of the pure metal from its ores and in the identification of zinc as a metal itself long before either of these scientifically important developments were understood and established in the Western world. The difficulty in the extraction of pure zinc from its ores is noteworthy and it testifies to the competence and expertise of Indian chemists and metallurgists in the ancient and medieval eras to have grasped sophisticated concepts of redox chemistry and their understanding of physico-chemical principles such as those involved in distillation. This could not have been possible if they had gone about their business in a purely empirical and random fashion-an analytical component must have been present in their strategic thinking. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Ethirajan Sukumar, Krishnamurthy Vinoth Kumar and Annamalai Manickavasagan; individual chapters, the contributors.