Silverware: Innovations and the Gilded Age

In 1801, T. Bruff patented a method for manufacturing spoons, which was soon followed by American patents for impressed rollers, bulk casting, water-powered buffing wheels, and forming spoons from flat silver sheets with a drop hammer. Other innovations came from the silver imitators, such as the Britannia metal manufacturers, who by the early nineteenth century produced flatware in various inexpensive white alloys. By the second half of the nineteenth century, entire forks and spoons were made by die stamping.