Antique and Vintage Silverplate

In 1742, a Sheffield, England, cutler named Thomas Boulsover reportedly spilled some molten silver onto the copper handle of a knife. This ordinary accident proved the catalyst for an extraordinary invention, a new metal called silverplate. Until 1742, all silver had been referred to as “plate,” whether it was hammered into ceremonial chalices for churches or formed into candlesticks and chocolates pots for Earls, Dukes, and other members of the titled class. But this new unhallmarked metal, known variously as fused plate or Old Sheffield Plate, made the metal accessible to Britain’s growing middle class, who embraced this “poor man’s silver” as their own. Whatever you call it, silverplate made between 1742 and 1840, when the process of electroplating was discovered, can be easily identified. In many objects from this period, one side is plated and the other is not. For example, the undersides of silverplate trays are often tinned. Even more telltale, though, was the practice of trimming the edge of a piece of silverplate at a sharp angle, so that the extra silver exposed by this cutting method could be folded, or rolled, over the exposed copper to form a silver rim—a common practice among antiques dealers is to scrape a fingernail along the underside edge of a piece to detect this resulting seam. Silver borders made of wire were also applied to the edges of silverplate pieces to hide their copper cores. Although Boulsover has achieved acclaim in history books for inventing silverplate, he did not manage to profit from it in his lifetime, in no small part because he shared his technique too freely. Josiah Hancock is generally credited as the first silverplate manufacturer, while Henry Tudor and Thomas Leader industrialized the process in 1760. Also influential was Thomas Bradbury, whose company was in business long enough to excel at both Old Sheffield Plate and electroplate. But it was a Birmingham manufacturer named Matthew Boulton who became the best known maker of Old Sheffield Plate, the geographic irony of his home town notwithstanding. Boulton worked with some of the best designers of the day, including Josiah Wedgwood. He also helped finance James Watt’s steam engine, modernized the production of British coins, and was a great patron of the arts. Electroplating arrived in 1840, when a Birmingham surgeon named John Wright discovered that a solution of potassium cyanide was an effective medium in electroplating. To electroplate an object such as a teapot, the teapot would be placed in a cement container filled with this solution. A positive pole would be attached to a submerged piece of silver, a negative pole to the submerged teapot. When the positive pole attached to the silver was given a low-voltage charge, the silver dissolved in the potassium cyanide, its atoms drawn to the negatively charged teapot, to which the silver atoms bonded. George and Henry Elkington patented Wright’s discovery, and had soon made Birmingham the electroplating capital of the world. Within a decade, the manufacture of Old Sheffield Plate effectively ceased. Electroplating arrived at a moment when the English middle class was expanding, which spurred the demand for, among other bourgeois comforts, full sets of silverware. When made of sterling silver and even Old Sheffield Plate, silverware had been expensive, but electroplating used very little silver, which made complete sets of knives, forks, and spoons affordable to a larger percentage of the population than ever before. For objects such as coffee pots, biscuit boxes, and condiment jars, electroplating allowed soldered joints at handles and feet to be stronger than those of similar pieces of Old Sheffield Plate. The obvious disadvantage of electroplate, though, was that the layer of actual silver in electroplate was very thin, which is why many antique pieces of electroplate display enough wear to reveal the copper or, in the case of Britannia ware, lesser metals below. Electroplate also tarnishes differently than fused plate, resulting in a patina that is less satisfying to the eye. That’s because pieces made of fused plate used sterling silver, which is only 92 ½ percent pure silver, whereas electroplate used 100 percent silver, which is whiter than sterling and produces a different patina. In the United States, some of the biggest manufacturers of electroplate have included Gorham, Reed and Barton, and Oneida, which was better known for being a failed polyamorous Christian utopia before it was associated with silverplate flatware and coffee pots.