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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 256405, member: 25&quot;]Silver plating only started when electricity had been discovered and made widely available. Think last quarter of the 19th C.</p><p><br /></p><p>Before plating (electrodeposition) there was either chemical or physical coating or casing of base metal objects.</p><p><br /></p><p>If treated at all bronze or brass objects may have been mercury gilded. Some gold is dissolved in mercury (happens at room temperature so take off your gold rings before playing with mercury)</p><p>The object is then painted with the mercury&nbsp; amalgam and placed in an oven. The mercury evaporates, the gold remains bonded to the base metal. The more gold in the mercury, the thicker and more durable the gold coat. Candlesticks may have started out gilded.</p><p>This&nbsp; does not work for silver. </p><p>For silver take a plate of copper an inch thick and solder a plate of silver 1/10th inch thick to it. You can do both sides to make a silver/copper/silver sandwich.</p><p>Roll out the sandwich as thin as you need and make stuff with it like you would with solid sheet silver.</p><p>This is called Old Sheffield Plate. When done with gold it is either rolled gold or gold filled depending on where you live.</p><p>OSP was used to make candlesticks by the end of the 18th C. </p><p><br /></p><p>Nowadays pieces of OSP usually have extensive wear-through to the copper. </p><p><br /></p><p>To get back to your original post, there are no 18th C candlesticks around that were originally silver plated. </p><p><br /></p><p>If you mean the 1800s instead of the 18th C. about all that can be said is that people bought what they could afford, as cheaper production became possible, more people could afford better (more valuable) looking stuff.</p><p>Until well into the 19th C. there really were no middle classes as we know them today. Income gaps between the lower class and even the petty bourgoisie were much larger than we are used to today, especially in terms of cash and disposable income.</p><p><br /></p><p>As posed, your question does not really have an answer, as society and consumption were so very different a couple of hundred years ago.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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