Marks on German & French silverplated cutlery

[Bahner]

Bahner has kindly allowed the text of the following two posts to be expanded into an illustrated essay. The resulting article can be found at:
Numerical Marks on European Silverplate

Hello all, there are repeated questions about the meaning of marks on German silverplated cutlery. Some may find a lengthier explanation helpful. This refers to Germany only.

The production of silverplated cutlery on an industrial level began in Germany in the middle of the 19th century. Two factors limited the output: 1) acesss to electrical power was very limited back then. 2) electric current back then was weak compared to what we have today.
After some experimenting engineers achieved the best results if the used a small bath, put one dozen table spoons and one dozen table forks in it, used 90 Gramm of fine silver and then plated the pieces until the silver anodes were dissolved and the silver had firmly settled on the cutlery. This took many hours and in the beginning made the finished pieces quite expensive. The engineers found out, that a little more than half of the 90 Gramms used was spread on the 12 spoons (as they have a bigger surface than the forks), a little less than half was spread on the 12 forks. To use a larger bath would have lead to a much much longer plating process, which would have made this even more expensive. To use more than the 12 plus 12 pieces in a bath would lead to this: the pieces closest to the silver anodes would get a much thicker plating, the pieces far from the anodes would get a very thin plating. So the thickness of the silver layer would differ considerably.

Using 12 plus 12 pieces as described above and 90 Gramms of fine silver became a standard in Germany. To document this, the “90” was punched on the pieces. If companies wanted to produce cheaper cutlery, they used less silver, 60 Gramms, 40 Gramms or even 20 Gramms, which made the plating very thin. Some used more, 100 or 150 Gramms. Pieces were punched accordingly “60”, “40”, “20”, “100” etc.

The plating process was adapted for the other pieces of cutlery like knife-handles, smaller spoons, serving pieces etc. so that the silver layer on them was as thick as on the table spoons and table forks. As the same standard process was used, they all were stamped with the “90”. New techniques made it possible to plate more pieces in bigger baths in shorter time, using much bigger silver anodes. But the thickness of the plating remained the same , so the marks remained the same, too.

When plated cutlery became more and more affordable and more and more customers bought it, they began to ask how much pure silver their cutlery actually “contained”. Producers realized that they could use the answer as an argument to promote sales. So they started punching a further mark, which roughly gave the actual weight of the silver in Gramms on the pieces. Unfortunately they used two different systems. 1) For pieces that usually come in a dozen (table- forks /-spoons / -knives, coffeespoons etc.) they punched the weight of silver used for plating a dozen pieces. So on tableforks and tablespoons they punched a “45”, on smaller pieces they punched a lower figure (e.g. “35”), as less silver was needed to give them the same thickness of plating. 2) For pieces that usually come single or in pairs (serving pieces) they punched the weight of silver on a single piece.

Examples:
If You have a table spoon marked “90” and “45” it means: the standard process as described above was used, on one spoon roughly 1/12 of 45 Gramms (ca. 3,75 Gramms) of fine silver were spread.
If You have a sugar tong marked “90” and ”2” it means: again the standard process was used, 2 Gramms of fine silver were spread on the piece.
If You have a pair of salad servers, each piece marked “90” and “4” it means: again the standard process was used, on each piece 4 Gramms of fine silver were spread.

Best wishes, Bahner
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[Bahner]

Hello, repeated questions about the meaning of the „84 g.“ or “84 Gr.” on pieces of cutlery make it seem to be a good idea to add some remarks to the post above.

In 1927 Kehr wrote an (unpublished) doctoral thesis on the metalware industries of Saxonia / Germany. He had access to the archives of major German companies. That is why I believe that what he writes is trustworthy. On page 42 he mentiones (without naming his source) that it was Christofle of France, the most important maker of its time, that in the late 1860ies adopted the German production standards (as mentioned in the post above) to French production standards (with the other French makers following Christofle). There is one thing Christofle changed, though: instead of using 90 Gramms of fine silver for electroplating, Christofle first used just 80 Gramms, later 84 Gramms. The pieces were marked accordingly. Kehr does not explain, why Christofle made that change. The smaller pieces received the same thickness of silver plating as the larger pieces. As less silver was used for that, pieces were marked accordingly “12 Gr.”, “18 Gr.” etc. So this is basically the same way it was done in Germany.

The French pieces were marked twice. One mark was the “84 Gr.” (or “12 Gr.” etc.) mark, most often in a square. The other mark was what - for the sake of simplicity - shall be called the maker’s mark (though it sometimes actually was a retailer’s mark). It never came in a lozenge (this form was to be found on silver objects only), but again most often in a square (though other forms as rectangles etc.were also used). These two marks are the marks usually found on French silverplated cutlery. The place where these two marks were punched was quite typical of French plate: it was not the down side of the piece, but the up side and not the handle, but the front part. Spoons for example were punched inside the bowl, the maker’s mark on the left hand side, the “84 Gr.” mark on the right hand side.

The “84 Gr” mark is often mistaken for a Russian silver mark. There are notable differences between the marks on French plated pieces as described above and Russian silver marks. Though a “84” (but never with an additional “g” or “Gr”) may appear on Russian silver pieces (standing for a silver fineness of 875/1000), there is always more than one additional mark on Russian silver. In fact, there can or should also be: the maker’s mark, a town mark, a warden’s mark (sometimes with integrated date) and possibly a double-headed eagle as the mark of a court-supplier. All these marks are usually punched on the back of the handle, sometimes - not too often - on the back of the bowl of a spoon, but never - as the French do - on the inside of the bowl.

So there are quite a few points that can help tell a French plated piece from a Russian piece of silver cutlery.

I apologize that this got somewhat longish, but I hope that there are users of this wonderful forum who will find it interesting nevertheless. Best wishes, Bahner
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[admin]

Numerical Marks on European Silverplate
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