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than half a century, he never sold an article of a lower standard of purity than the one established by law or by the nature of the precious metals.

About the year 1825, some Boston people discovered that a tolerable silver spoon could be made much thinner than the custom of the trade had previously permitted, and that these thin spoons could be sold by pedlers very advantageously. The consequence of this discovery was, that silver spoons became an article of manufacture in Boston, whence pedlers conveyed them to the remotest nooks of New England. One day, in 1830, the question occurred to Jabez Gorham, Why not make spoons in Providence, and sell them to the pedlers who buy our jewelry? The next time he took his trunk of trinkets to Boston, he looked about him for a man who knew something of the art of spoon-making. One such he found, a young man just "out of his time," whom he took back with him to Providence, where he established him in an odd corner of his jewelry shop. In this small way, thirty-seven years ago, the business began which has grown to be the largest and most complete manufactory of silver-ware in the world. For the first ten years he made nothing but spoons, thimbles, and silver combs, with an occasional napkin-ring, if any one in Providence was bold enough to order one. Businesses grew very slowly in those days. It was thought a grand success when Jabez Gorham, after nearly twenty years' exertion, had fifteen men employed in making spoons, forks, thimbles, napkin-rings, children's mugs, and such small ware. Nor would Mr. Gorham, of his own motion, have ever carried the business much farther; certainly not to the point of producing articles that approach the rank of works of art. We have heard the old gentleman say, that he often stood at a store-window in Boston, wondering by what process certain operations were performed in silver, the results of which he saw before him in the form of pitchers and teapots.

Gorham, the present head of the house, eldest son of the founder, came upon the scene, an aspiring, ingenious young man, whose nature it was to excel in anything in which he might chance to engage. The silversmith's art was then so little known in the United States that neither workmen nor information could be obtained here in its higher branches. Mr. John Gorham crossed the ocean soon after coming of age, and examined every leading silver establishment in Europe. He was freely admitted everywhere, as no one in the business had ever thought of America as a possible competitor; still less did any one see in this quiet Yankee youth the person who was to annihilate the American demand for European silver-ware, and produce articles which famous European houses would servilely copy. From the time of Mr. John Gorham's return dates the eminence of the present company, and of the production of the costlier kinds of silver-ware, on a great scale, in the United States. From first to last, the company have induced sixtythree accomplished workmen to come from Europe and settle in Providence, some of whom might not unjustly be enrolled in the list of artists.

The war gave an amazing development to this business, as it did to all others ministering to pleasure or the sense of beauty. When the war began, in 1861, the Gorham Company employed about one hundred and fifty men; and in 1864 this number had increased to four hundred, all engaged in making articles of solid silver. Even with this great force the company were sometimes unable to supply the demand for their beautiful products. On Christmas morning, 1864, there was left in the store in Maiden Lane, New York, but seven dollars' worth of ware, out of an average stock of one hundred thousand dollars' worth. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised at this. Consider our silver weddings. It is not unusual for several thousands of dollars' worth of silver to be presented on these occaBut in due course of time Mr. John sions, -in one recent instance, sixteen

thousand dollars' worth was given. And what lady can be married, now-a-days, without having a few pounds of silver given to her? For Christmas presents, of course, silver-ware is always among the objects dangerous to the sanity of those who go forth, just before the holidays, with a limited purse and unlimited desires.

What particularly surprises the visit or to the Gorham works at Providence is to see labor-saving machinery - the ponderous steam-hammer, the stamping and rolling apparatus-employed in silver work, instead of the baser metals to which they are usually applied. Nothing is done by hand which can be done by machinery; so that the three hundred men usually employed in solid ware are in reality doing the work of a thousand. The first operation is to buy silver coin in Wall Street. In a bag of dollars there are always some bad pieces; and as the company embark their reputation in every silver vessel that leaves the factory, and are always responsible for its purity, each dollar is wrenched asunder and its goodness positively ascertained before it is thrown into the crucible. The subsequent operations, by which these spoiled dollars are converted into objects of brilliant and enduring beauty, can better be imagined than described.

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New forms of beauty are the constant study of the artist in silver. One large apartment in the Gorham establishment the artists' room is a kind of magazine or storehouse of beautiful forms, which have been gathered in the course of years by Mr. George Wilkinson, the member of the company who has charge of the designing, and who is himself a designer of singular taste, fertility, and judgment. Here are deposited copies or drawings of all the former products of the establishment. Here is a large and most costly library of illustrated works in every department of art and science. Mr. Wilkinson gets ideas from works upon botany, sculpture, landscape, - from ancient bass-reliefs and modern porcelain; but, more frequently, from those large vol

umes which exhibit the glories of architecture. "The first requisite," he maintains, "of a good piece of silver-plate is that it be well built." The artist in silver has also to keep constantly in view the practical and commercial limitations of his art. The forms which he designs must be such as can be executed with due economy of labor and material, such as can be easily cleaned, and such as will please the taste of the silver-purchasing public. It is by his skill in complying with these inexorable conditions, while producing forms of real excellence, that Mr. Wilkinson has given such celebrity to the articles made by the company to which he belongs.

Few of us, however, will ever be able to buy the dinner-sets, the tea-sets, the gorgeous salvers, and the tall épergnes with which the warerooms of this manufactory are filled. A silver salver of large size costs a thousand dollars. A complete dinner-set for a party of twenty-four costs twelve thousand dollars. The price of a nice tea-set can easily run into three thousand dollars. We noticed one small vase (six or eight inches high) exquisitely chased on two sides, which Mr. Wilkinson assured us it cost the company about seven hundred dollars to produce. There are, as yet, but two or three persons in all America who would be likely to become purchasers of the articles in silver which rank in Europe as works of art, and which are strictly entitled to that distinction. The wonder is who buys the massive utilities that are stacked away in such profusion in Maiden Lane. The Gorham Company have always in course of manufacture about three tons of silver, and usually have a ton of finished work for sale.

An important branch of their business is one recently introduced, — the manufacture of a very superior kind of plated ware, intended to combine the strength of baser metal with the beauty of silver. The manufacture of such ware has attained great development in England of late years, owing chiefly to the

application of the mysterious power of electricity to the laying-on of the silver. We must discourse a little upon this admirable application of science to the

arts.

Hamlet amused his friend Horatio by tracing the noble dust of Alexander till he found it stopping a bunghole. If we trace the course of discovery that resulted in this beautiful art, we shall have to reverse Hamlet's order: we must begin with the homely object, and end with magnificent ones. Electroplating, electrotyping, the electric telegraph, and many other arts and wonders, all go back to that dish of frogs which the amiable and fond Professor Galvani was preparing for his sick wife's dinner one day, about the year 1787. It was a curious reflection, when we were illuminating our houses to celebrate the laying of the first Atlantic cable, that this bewildering and unique triumph of man over nature had no more illustrious origin than the legs of an Italian frog. We are aware that the honor has been claimed for a Neapolitan mouse. There is a story in the books of a mouse in Naples that had the impudence, in 1786, to bite the leg of a professor of medicine, and was caught in the act by the professor himself, who punished his audacity by dissecting him. While doing so, he observed that, when he touched a nerve of the creature with his knife, its limbs were slightly convulsed. The professor was struck with the circumstance, was puzzled by it, mentioned it, and it was recorded; but as nothing further came of it, no connection can be established between that mouse and the splendors of silver-plated ware and the wonders of the telegraph. The claims of Professor Galvani's frog rest upon a sure foundation of fact. Signora Galvani- so runs one version of the story -lay sick upon a couch in a room in which there was that chaos of domestic utensils and philosophical apparatus that may still be observed sometimes in the abodes of men addicted to science. The Professor himself had prepared the frogs for the stew-pan, and

left them upon a table near the conductor of an electrical machine. A student, while experimenting with the machine, chanced to touch with a steel instrument one of the frogs at the intersection of the legs. The sick lady observed that, as often as he did so, the legs were convulsed, or, as we now say, were galvanized. Upon her husband's return to the room, she mentioned this strange thing to him, and he immediately repeated the experiment.

From 1760 to 1790, as the reader is probably aware, all the scientific world was on the qui vive with regard to electricity. The most brilliant reputations of that century had been won by electric discoveries. Franklin was still alive, to reward with his benignant approval those who should contribute anything valuable after his own immense additions to man's knowledge of this alluring and baffling element. It was, therefore, as much the spirit of the time as the genius of the man, that made Galvani seize this new fact with eagerness, and investigate it with untiring enthusiasm. It was a sad day for the frogs of the Pope's dominions when Signora Galvani observed those two naked legs fly apart and crook themselves with so much animation. There was slaughter in the swamps of Bologna for many a month thereafter. For mankind, however, it was a day to be held in everlasting remembrance, since it was then that was taken the first step toward the galvanic battery!

As fortune favors the brave, so accident aids the ingenious. After Professor Galvani had touched the muscles and nerves of many frogs with the spark drawn from the electrical machine, another accident occurred which led directly to the discovery of the galvanic battery. Having skinned a frog, he chanced to hang it by a copper hook upon an iron nail; and thus, without knowing it, he brought together the elements of a battery, - two metals and a wet frog. His object in hanging up this frog was to see if the electricity of the atmosphere would produce any effects, however slight, similar to those pro

duced when the spark of the machine was applied to the creature. It did not. After watching his frog awhile, the Professor was proceeding to take it down, and while in the act of doing so the legs were convulsed! Struck with this occurrence, he replaced the frog, took it down again, put it back, took it down, until he discovered that, as often as the damp frog (still hanging upon its copper hook) touched the iron nail, the contraction of the muscles took place, as if the frog had been touched by a conductor connected with an electrical machine. This experiment was repeated hundreds of times, and varied in as many ways as mortal ingenuity could devise. Galvani at length settled down upon the method following: he wrapped the nerves taken from the loins of a frog in a leaf of tin, and placed the legs of the frog upon a plate of copper; then, as often as the leaf of tin was brought in contact with the plate of copper, the legs of the frog were convulsed.

People regard Charles Lamb's story of the discovery of roast pig as a most extravagant and impossible fiction; but, really, Professor Galvani comported himself very much in the manner of that great discoverer. It was no more necessary to employ the frog's nerves in the production of the electricity, than it was necessary to burn down a house in roasting pig for dinner. The poor frog contributed nothing to it but his dampness,

as every boy in a telegraph office now perceives. He was merely the wet in the small galvanic battery. Professor Galvani, however, exulting in his discovery, leaped to the conclusion that this electricity was not the same as that produced by friction. He thought he had discovered the long sought something by which the muscles move obedient to the will. "All creatures," he wrote, "have an electricity inherent in their economy, which resides specially in the nerves, and is by the nerves communicated to the whole body. It is secreted by the brain. The interior substance of the nerves is endowed with a conducting

power for this electricity, and facilitates its movement and its passage from one part of the nervous system to another; while the oily coating of these organs hinders the dissipation of the fluid, and permits its accumulation." He also thought that the muscles were the Leyden jars of the animal system, in which the electricity generated by the brain and conducted by the nerves was hoarded up for use. When a man was tired, he had merely used his electricity too fast; when he was fresh, his Leyden jars were all full.

The publication of these experiments in 1791, accompanied by Galvani's theory of animal electricity, produced a sensation in scientific circles only inferior to that caused by Franklin's demonstration of the identity of lightning with electricity, thirty years before. The murder of innocent frogs extended from the marshes of Bologna to the swamps of all Christendom. "Wherever," says a writer of the time, "frogs were to be found and two different metals could be procured, every one was anxious to see the mangled limbs of frogs brought to life in this wonderful way." Or, as Lamb says, in the dissertation upon Roast Pig: "The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction." At first the facts and the theory of Galvani were equally accepted; and a grateful world insisted upon styling the new science, as it was Thus a word deemed, "Galvanism.” was added to all the languages, which has been found useful in its literal sense, and forcible in its figurative. Whatever we may think of Galvani's philosophy, we cannot deny that he immortalized his name. He died a few years after, fully satisfied with his theory, but having no suspicion of the many, the peculiar, the marvellous results that were to flow from the chance discovery of the fact, that a moist frog placed between two different metals was a kind of electrical machine.

Among the Italians who caught at Galvani's discovery, the most skilful and learned was Professor Volta, of

Como, who had been an ardent electrician from his youth. Many of our readers have seen this year the colossal statue of that great man, which adorns his native city on the southern shore of the lake. The statue was worthily decreed, because the man who contributes ever so little to a grand discovery in science - provided that little is essential to it-ranks among the greatest benefactors of his species. And what did the admirable Volta discover? Reducing the labors of his long life to their simplest expression, we should say that his just claim to immortality consists in this, he found out that the frog had nothing to do with the production of electricity in Galvani's experiment, but that a wet card or rag would do as well. This discovery was the central fact of his scientific career of sixty-four years. It took all of his familiar knowledge of electricity, acquired in twenty-seven years of entire devotion to the study, to enable him to interpret Galvani's apparatus so far as to get rid of the frog; and he spent the remaining thirty-seven years of his existence in varying the experiment thus freed from that "demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body." It was a severe affliction to the followers of Galvani and to the University of Bologna to have their darling theory of the nervous electricity so rudely yet so unanswerably refuted. "I do not need your frog!" exclaimed the too impetuous Volta. "Give me two metals and a moist rag, and I will produce your animal electricity. Your frog is nothing but a moist conductor, and in this respect is not as good as a wet rag." This was a decisive fact, and it silenced all but a few of the disciples of the dead Galvani.

Volta was led to discard the frog by observing that no electric results followed when the two plates were of the same metal. Suspecting from this that the frog was merely a conductor (instead of the generator) of the electric fluid, he tried the experiment with a wet card placed between two pairs of plates, and thus discovered that the secret lay in the metals being hetero

geneous. But it cost thousands of experiments to reach this result, and ten years of ceaseless thought and exertion to arrive at the invention of the "pile," which merely consists of many pairs of heterogeneous plates, each separated by a moist substance. The weight of so much metal squeezed the wet cloth dry, and this led to various contrivances for keeping it wet, resulting at last in the invention of the familiar "troughbattery," now employed in all telegraph offices and manufactories of electroanything. Instead of Galvani's frog or Volta's wet rag, the conductor is a solution of sulphuric acid, which Volta himself suggested and employed. The negative electricity is conveyed to the earth by a wire, and the positive is conducted from pair to pair, increasing as it goes, 'until, if the battery is large enough, it may have the force to send a message round the world. And the current is continuous. The galvanic battery is an electrical machine that goes without turning a handle. By the galvanic battery, electricity is made subservient to man. Among other things, it sends his messages, faces his type with copper, silvers his coffee-pot, and coats the inside of his baby's silver mug with shining gold.

The old methods of covering metals with a plating of silver were so difficult and laborious, that durable ware could never have been produced by them except at an expense which would have defeated the object. In those slow and costly ways plated articles were made as late as the year 1840; and thus they might be made at the present moment, if Signora Galvani had been looking the other way when the student touched the frog with his knife. More than fifty years elapsed before that chance discovery was made available in the art we are considering. For many years the discoveries of Galvani and Volta did not appear to add much to the resources of man, though they excited his "special wonder." Elderly readers can perhaps remember the appalling accounts that used to be published, forty years ago or more, of the gal

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