But, however beautiful the silver of our forbears and however valuable now, from a historic standpoint, there are few of us who, if given the choice, would not decide in favor of the product of the twentieth century silversmith, who brings to his creations all of the good of the old masters, and who has the facilities for turning out work more perfect in line and detail and uniformity than was ever dreamed of by the silver worker of old.
Fronts and Backs of Two Early American Spoons of the Rat-Tail Type
The spoon in the center is the earliest of that type, made about 1690. The other dates about 1695.
We admire the beautiful silverware that we see in the shop windows, we derive satisfaction and pleasure from the daily use of silver on our tables, but few people have any understanding how silver plate is made; and there is, perhaps, still less knowledge of its interesting history.
The combining of two separate metals—that is, the plating of a base metal with a finer one—was, until the eighteenth century, a lost art of the ancients.
The application of one metal upon another was practiced by the Assyrians, who overlapped iron with bronze; copper implements and ornaments coated with silver have been found at Herculaneum, while many ancient Roman specimens of harness and armor are found to be ornamented with silver on copper. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru used the process of fixing two metals together by the action of heat, before making up. The method was also known to the old Celts, as shown by specimens found in Iceland. It seems, however, to have been a lost art in Europe, probably because up to the thirteenth century the Church had control of the arts and crafts in England, and the finer metal work was used only for church vessels, the household implements being very simple and mostly of wood and cheap metal.
Horace Walpole, writing in 1760, states: “I passed through Sheffield, a business town in a charming situation, with 22,000 inhabitants, and they remit £11,000 a week to London. One man there has discovered the art of plating copper with silver.”
The inventor to whom the quotation refers was Thomas Bolsover, a skilled silversmith, who, in the year 1742, it is traditionally reported, while repairing a thin layer of silver on the copper handle of a knife, evolved the idea of combining copper with silver in layers ready for manufacture into any desired form.
