GOLD PLATING

 History

When a base metal is covered with a small amount of a more precious metal. This technique was developed by Thomas Bolover in the 1740s, when he found out how to fuse a thin layer of silver onto a sheet of copper by heating and then rolling them together.

19 th century it as a plied to gold is called sweat plating, in America, also called gold filled or rolled gold, as the gold was rolled on to the surface of the cheaper base metal. [1]

From 1942, most American costume jewelry made of metal was “vermeil,” silver plated with yellow gold. Faux gold was already outstripping faux platinum by the late 1930s because it was more versatile and could be worn during the day and at night. This gold plating was many times thicker and longer-lasting than on later costume jewelry, so wartime pieces have a richer, warmer, more realistic finish than the shiny, frankly fake look typical of the mid-1950s. Vermeil pieces were sometimes cast in the lost-wax method, a process that had been largely reserved for precious jewelry up to now.

Silver was used for necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, but the 1940s vermeil clip or brooch was the most popular lapel decoration for a suit, and most epitomized the wartime period. Abstract versions were still heavy and often retro in style, but the use of silver and the new setting techniques made them far less crude than in the 1930s. The Machine Age look remained, but softened into drapery-like folds, scrolls, pleats, and ruffles. Decoration was reduced to a minimum in favor of wide expanses of plain, sculptured metal. This was now a practical necessity rather than simple preference, because rhinestones and pastes had become very scarce.

Starting in 1942 the majority of jewels were made in “vermeil” or gild­ ed silver. This new plating was extremely robust and long-lasting and the new pieces made in vermeil were sometimes produced using the lost wax method until then reserved for precious ornaments.[2]

P7 During the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, factories began mass-producing jewelry. Machine stamping and electroplating were invented and materials other than gold were used in jewelry manufacture. These new and exciting processes were incorporated with previous methods of imitating precious stones, enabling lovely imitation jewels to be mass-produced. Thereafter, prices for individual pieces came down to fractions of the costs of a generation earlier. Working class people were able to purchase jewelry which no longer was a luxury only the elite could afford. As a result, more jewelry was manufactured, purchased, worn and kept for posterity. [3]

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were felt in all parts of society worldwide. Electroplating had been developed early in the nineteenth century and by 1840, for example, the Birmingham firm of Elkington applied this new process to jewelry manufacture. This allowed for tremendous amounts of jewelry to be made at much lower prices. Birmingham became the center of mass-produced jewelry in England. Small family-run businesses and cottage crafts were being replaced by large factories. The factories began mass-producing jewelry and accessories, enabling the working person to own what they once only dreamed about. Jewelry was no longer just for the elite and nobility. More jewelry was manufactured, purchased, worn and eventually passed down through the years. The beginnings of costume jewelry go as far back as the developments of paste, pinchbeck and cut steel, but only with industrialization and mass production in the middle of the nineteenth century could costume jewelry begin to flourish. [4]

Alessandro Volta by 1796 he had constructed a column of electric generating elements consisting of silver and zinc plates in contact, each pair separated by a moist pad. it now made available for the first time a low voltage continuous current as opposed to the high voltage discharges, lasting only a fraction of a second, from the static electrical machines.

July 1838 one of Elkington's assistants, Oglethorpe Wakelin Barratt, together with the senior partner, filed a patent for coating copper and brass with zinc, the process involving the immersion of the metal to be coated in solution of zinc while in contact with a piece of metallic zinc or with zinc amalgam. Although no mention was made of a battery, this showed the first glimmer of the idea of a galvanic circuit.[5]

Gold plating of silver is used in the manufacture of jewelry. The thickness of gold plating on jewelry is noted in microns (or micro-meters). The microns of thickness determines how long the gold plating lasts with usage. The jewelry industry denotes different qualities of gold plating in the following terminology

1.    Gold flashed / Gold washed - gold layer thickness less than 0.5 micron

2.    Gold plated - gold layer thickness greater than equal to 0.5 micron

3.    Heavy gold plated / Vermeil - gold layer thickness greater than equal to 100 micron

Gold plated silver jewelry can still tarnish as the silver atoms diffuse into the gold layer, causing slow gradual fading of its color and eventually causing tarnishing of the surface. This process may take months and even years, depending on the thickness of the gold layer. A barrier metal layer is used to counter this effect - these can be Nickel or Rhodium. Copper, which also migrates into gold, does so more slowly than silver. The copper is usually further plated with nickel. A gold-plated silver article is usually a silver substrate with layers of copper, nickel, and gold deposited on top of it.[6]

original from National museum collection

Photo credit: Greta Lindström / Nationalmuseum

 Wiwen Nilsson is among Sweden’s, and for many, one of Scandinavia's most important silversmith. He is the only one who pioneered working primarily in a cubic style, where he uses geometry as the design language. Wiwen Nilsson’s heritage from Lund, in south Sweden. Cubism and geometry are recurring themes in all of his works from jewelry to silverware. Wiwen Nilsson uses this design language throughout his career.

Nilsson made a series of bird brooches that explores distilled layered shapes of birds. The broches in this series are made of silver or gold plated in different gold karats and colors. He can combine green and yellow gold with sterling silver. He uses the different metals and their colors like a painter uses paint on the canvas.

Pieces like this would been very costly to make in solid gold, before gold plating. A brooch made of solid gold have had such a high price pointe that they never would have reached the wide audience. The development of gold plating allowed Nilsson to play with the different colors and to reveled the beauty that lays in the shimmering colors of gold.  re-designed bracelet

REDESIGNED BROOCH

RE-DESIGN

I expended Nilssons original shape of the bird brooch. I carefully broke it down to four layers.

I keep Nilssons layered shape and with the help of CAD-design and I carefully broke it down to four layers. I rasterized the surface of the layers and created a grid made of curve lines. CAD-design made it was easy to try out different raster sizes and distances to find the right one that would fit this specific brooch’s proportions.  

For me, there is always a haptic loss of information while using CAD-design. The information read by the hand and the way your body interacts with and object is so different that I always need to pint out the design at certain times during the design process. This brooch was printed in various sizes and thicknesses during the design process just so I could have a tactile experience with the design before it was finalized.

process picture

3d-model of redesign

Footnotes

[1] A collectors guid to costume jewlery, 49p

[2] Jewelery from Art neuvo to 3dprinting

[3] Popular jewelry 1840-1940 p 7

[4] Popular jewelry 1840-1940 P 10

[5] The Early History of Gold Plating A TANGLED TALE OF DISPUTED PRIORITIES L. B. Hunt Johnson Matthey & Co Limited, London https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF03215178.pdf

[6] Weisberg, Alfred M. (1997). "Gold Plating". Products Finishing Magazine. Retrieved 2013-04-03.

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