The Popular Science Review Author:James Samuelson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON THE APPLICATION OF SCIENCE TO ELECTRO- PLATE MANUFACTURES. PART II. THE success of an important enterprise has frequently depended upon an apparently... more » trivial circumstance, and it was even so with the important process of silver electro-plating in the early period of its development. In the year 1838, Messrs. G. R. and II. Elkington were engaged, commercially, in coating military and other metal ornaments with gold" and silver, by immersing them in various solutions of those metals, some of which were composed of ferrocyanide of potassium, and also carbonate of potash, with the oxides of gold and silver dissolved in them. By this process of simple immersion, although the action was electrical, the articles received only an extremely thin film or coating of the precious metals, and it was highly desirable that the thickness should be considerably increased, on account of the greater degree of durability required. About this period, Professor Jacobi, of St. Petersburg (October, 1838), and Mr. Spencer, of Liverpool (May, 1839), published their processes of electrotype for copying engraved plates in copper by separate currents of electricity, by means of which a firm coating of copper, of considerable thickness, could be readily obtained. From the moment that this method of obtaining ihiclc deposits of firm copper by means of a separate electric current was made known, Mr. John Wright, a surgeon of Birmingham, and Mr. Alexander Parkes, a modeller and experimentalist, in the employ of Messrs. Elkington, were constantly engaged in experiments, to obtain thick deposits of silver and gold by si milar means. A great variety of liquids were tried for the purpose, but all the solutions of gold and silver operated upon gave only a thin deposit of firm metal, which, as it incr...« less