Old Sheffield Plate

Old Sheffield Plate – also known as just ‘Sheffield Plate’ and ‘fused plate’ was the first commercially viable technique for plating metal.

Thomas Boulsover accidentally discovered the method in Sheffield in 1743 when attempting to repair the handle of a customer’s decorative knife. He’d overheated the handle and the silver melted fusing with the copper. When he tried to reshape the fused material the two metals behaved as one, even though both layers were clearly visible.

Funded by Strelley Pegge of Beauchief, Boulsover started a business and did further experiments on fusing thin sheets of silver onto thick ingots of copper. The process worked and the resulting metal was able to be rolled out into thinner sheets maintaining the same ratio of thickness as the original. This enabled him to make thin sheets of metal that had a thin layer of silver coating a thicker layer of copper underneath.

Boulsover developed the technique of sandwiching an ingot of copper between two thin plates of silver, tightly binding it with wire and then heating it in a furnace. This was then milled into sheets from which objects were made.

When buttons were made with this new material they looked and behaved like silver buttons but could be produced at a fraction of the cost.

The technique was gradually replaced with electroplating discovered in the 1840s and faded out as a major production item in the 1860s.