Makers, Periods & Styles Library

Chubb & Sons – was a firm set up by Charles Chubb in 1804. It started out as a ship’s ironmongers in Winchester then moving to Portsmouth. In 1818 Charles moved the firm to Wolverhampton and was joined by his brother Jeremiah. Jeremiah invented and patented a ‘detector lock’ which enabled the lock’s owner...

The ‘cire perdue’ method (also called lost wax) is a way of casting bronze statues and other objects. A model of the object or statue is made out of wax and then encased to make a mold. Once the mold is made the wax is then drained away, and the hollow left behind filled with […]

See: Bronze method – ‘Cold Cast’

Can be traced back to 1890 when it began releasing brown wax cylinder recordings featuring mainly band marches and whistling solos. The technology improved and by 1950’s, under the auspices of EMI (Electric and Musical Industries) it had become a successful record label. The original American Columbia Records...

Coromandel wood or Calamander wood is type of wood from South East Asia mainly India and Sri Lanka. It is extremely dense, which makes it heavy and hard and also slow growing. Its of a hazel-brown colour with black stripes. It has now been logged to extinction over the last two to three hundred years […]

A Credenza is a dining room sideboard comprising a central cupboard often flanked by glass display cabinets. Made from a burnished and polished wood they were often decorated with marquetry and with a top made of marble or other decorative stone or an inlaid wood that were heat and liquid resistant. They became...

This process from “crystal” + “oleum” (oil), was a method of applying colour to an albumen print, popular from c.1880 to c.1910. The albumen print was the first commercially viable way of producing a photographic print on paper from a negative, and crystoleum provided a method of colouring this print. How it worked...

A Davenport desk is a small desk with a sloping lifting desktop attached with hinges to the back of the desk. Inside the lifting top there is a large storage compartment used for storing paper and other writing equipment as well as pigeonholes and small drawers. A stack of side drawers holds up the back […]