When Silver Plate isn’t Plate?

Many people are going through storage units these days. I know because I get calls about objects people rediscovered. One of my clients found an old set of silver. The back shows a marking ‘de Ruolz,’ with a hallmark for a tall mast ship.

Like so many objects of art, without the technology to make the thing, there’s no-thing. So the history of artifacts intersects the history of technology in a significant sense. Silver-like flatware owed their existence to new developments in science, like TG’s set of silver.

Inventing Ruolz-ware

Silver-like cutlery was invented under the reign of Napoleon III. He thought highly of the process and ordered a set of 3,000 for the Tuileries, as we learn in the book The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire 1852-1871 by Alain Plessis.

Its inventor, the French Industrial chemist Henri Catherine Camille comte de Ruolz-Montchal, called the set Ruolz-ware. In 1841 he discovered the process for gilding and silver-plating metals using a voltaic pile. Like many other inventions, an inventor in England, George Elkington, contested that HE invented this process first. The French Roulz, who patented many (17) processes for plating, won the dispute.

Not as Expensive as Real Silver

The pattern owned by TG we call Chinon, circa 1862, also called Fillet, or Vieux Paris, and was once described as stately like a fine violin. The de Ruolz stamp didn’t indicate an origin, the hallmark does. But the name indicates the process, similar to US and British silver plate that states EPNS (electroplated nickel silver).

Flatware begins early on with real silver as its composition, yet solid silver has grade of purity. So we call 92.5 percent in a spoon Sterling, because the British hold it most desirable. Other countries use their own assay preferences. European silver is sometimes 80 percent, called coin in America. The French standard for pure silver is 95 percent. And we always refer to it as a rich man’s tableware.

If you wanted an expensive looking table and couldn’t afford silver, by the early 19th century silver plating became an option. At first they accomplished it by hammering silver over a base metal. In the mid-19th century electroplating, a voltage in a chemical bath, usually upon the base metal of copper, came into use. But copper tended to show through, so French chemists looked for another whiter base metal.

Those chemists like Ruolz found an alloy, using nickel, that didn’t contain silver but supported a thin plating and still retain the silvery glow. The name for these alloy compositions (metal argente) are metal blanc, nickel, alfenide, maillechort, and Christofle. The Christofle company developed mass production of base cutlery and flatware that they plated later, a change from the arduous single piece process.

Ruolz then developed a third category of silverware

The Metal Alliage Blanc base metal contains a mix of 20-30 percent silver, 25 percent nickel, and 30 percent copper. The base metal contained real silver, silvered over with a plating. Because this was neither silver nor silver plate, and more expensive, this type of silverware was made for a very short time, from 1852-1871.

You see TG owns something rather rare. Although his set is incomplete, we see the large spoon is a spife, that is, a spoon with a knife edge, made for cutting into soft desserts.

French table settings differ from American and British forms

French service would ALWAYS be set upon the table FACE DOWN, to make the hallmarks evident. You’d see a large spoon, no medium size spoon (such as a teaspoon), a very small spoon, a large and small knife, a fish knife with an accompanying fork with three prongs, a large and small fork, and a two pronged fork.

TG’s set has the large dessert spife, the small knives, the two sizes of forks, and the very small spoon. The only real essential form missing is the large knives.

These days when we eat out of the refrigerator with clean hands, it’s mind boggling to think of setting a fine French mid-19th century table, isn’t it?

Because the Christofle Company bought the Ruolz patent, the closest comparable I found is a vintage Christofle pattern selling for $650 for the number of pieces TG owns.