The Romans produced considerable quantities of brass ( an alloy of zinc and copper ) as early as 200 BC by a cementation process where copper was reacted with zinc oxide.
12.
The cementation process continued to be used but literary sources from both Europe and the Islamic world seem to describe variants of a higher temperature liquid process which took place in open-topped crucibles.
13.
In the early modern period, brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, was usually produced by a cementation process in which metallic copper was heated with calamine, a zinc ore, to make calamine brass.
14.
Blister steel was made from wrought iron by packing wrought iron in charcoal and heating for several days . See : Cementation process The blister steel could be heated and hammered with wrought iron to make shear steel, which was used for cutting edges like scissors, knives and axes.
15.
Comprehensive accounts of the salt cementation processes is given by; Biringuccio in his " The Method of cementing gold and of Bringing it to its Ultimate Fineness . "; in the " Probierbuchlein " Little Books on Assaying; by Georgius Agricola in book 10 of De Re Metallica; and by Ercker in his " Treatise on ores and assaying ".
