Jean-Jacques Dony
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Jean-Jacques Daniel Dony (born February 24, 1759 in Liège ; † November 6, 1819 there ) was an entrepreneur and inventor who was the first to be able to produce pure metallic zinc by evaporating calamine .
Live and act
The son of the transport company Jacques Lambert Joseph Dony and Anne Catherine b. Rampton was initially prepared to inherit and run his father's transportation business. At the same time he occupied himself with spiritual ideas in his youth, became a member of the lay canon of the Sainte-Croix college in 1778 and was referred to as " Abbé " because of his Christian attitude , without having actually completed a church career.
Dony's main passion, however, was experimenting with chemical substances and their properties. He spent most of the hours in his own chemistry lab, which he built when he was twenty. In 1784 he was accepted into the learned society "Société d'émulation" and came into contact with the physicist François Laurent Villette (1729-1809) and the pharmacist and later artist Henric Joseph Delloye (1752-1810). Through them Dony was made aware of the potential uses of the calmeis and he applied to the prefect of the Ourthe department for mining rights for the calme mines of the "Old Mountain" in Kelmis , where zinc spar had been extracted since the 15th century , and received on December 17th In 1805 the approval of the prefecture, confirmed by Napoléon Bonaparte by decree of March 24, 1806. A year later, Dony set up a zinc factory in Saint-Léonard near Liège, where he initially produced according to methods that had been used up to now and, according to tradition, gave Napoléon a zinc bathtub as a thank you for the concession, which he then carried with him on his Russian campaigns and which is nowadays in the "House of Metallurgy and Industry" in Liège.
In the years that followed, Dony concentrated on experiments to optimize zinc extraction and developed a special reduction furnace for this purpose . In this closed, almost oxygen-free furnace, the rock containing zinc spar was heated in such a way that the zinc released as a result initially rose in gaseous form, then cooled and liquefied. This dripping mass could now be caught by several obliquely mounted plates and led into a tub, where it solidified into a highly pure zinc lump. The relatively light but nonetheless stable material could then either be rolled out into plates in further operations or shaped with the aid of presses or dies with the addition of heat. Dony officially presented this new and more economical zinc production process on October 1, 1809, and received a 15-year patent on his invention from Napoléon on January 19, 1810 by imperial decree. In the same year he acquired five of these new reduction furnaces for his Liège factory and in 1812 he set up an additional rolling mill in the Angleur district of Liège . In order to draw attention to the products from his new process, he equipped the St. Barthélemy Church in Liège with a new zinc roof.
But both the modernization of his factory in Saint-Léonard and the expansion of his mine in Kelmis as well as the establishment of the rolling mill in Angleur and poor marketing meant that Dony was financially overwhelmed. He then made his accountant Hector Chaulet a partner and renamed his company as "Dony et Compagnie". With the beginning of the collapse of the French empire and the zinc market that was completely shattered, Donys was left with gigantic zinc stocks and had to store more than 80% of the production, the bankruptcy could no longer be stopped. On April 25, 1813, the Brussels banker François-Dominique Mosselman finally acquired the broken company for a scrap price. A few years later, Dony died in utter poverty, with his widow and son von Mosselman receiving annual interest.
In 1837, Mosselman himself founded the Société Anonyme des Mines et Fonderies de Zinc de la Vieille-Montagne in the small and independent state of Neutral-Moresnet, which has been independent and neutral since 1815, and which included the factories, mines, shares and concessions of “Dony et Compagnie” which developed into a successful global company in the following decades. In 1989 it was integrated into the Union Minière Group and renamed " Umicore " in 2001 , whose zinc processing division was sold to Nyrstar in 2007 .
literature
- Jean-Jacqeus Dony , in: Dictionnaire des Wallons online
- Jean-Jacques Dony , in: Biography National Belge , Vol. VI. P. 127–131 ( digitized (French) )
- RG Max Liebig: Zinc and cadmium and their extraction from ores and by-products , Springer Verlag 2013 pp. 57 and 111–113 digitalisat
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dony, Jean-Jacques |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Dony, Jean-Jacques Daniel (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French inventor and entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 24, 1759 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Liege |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 6, 1819 |
| Place of death | Liege |