- [Narrator] Funding for "Chasing Silver: The Story of Gorham" has been provided in part by: - [Announcer] Our story began 70 years ago.

For decades, our fine jewelry has been curated from around the globe.

At Ross-Simons, we believe that every piece of our jewelry can be part of your story.

- [Narrator] It was 1847 in Providence, Rhode Island.

As the hot summer sun blazed through the factory windows at 12 Steeple Street, Jabez Gorham, one of the city's premier makers of silverwares, was ready to call it quits.

His youngest son and business partner, John, had been pressuring him to replace, of all things, their horse, Old Dick.

- My dad had this business of using Old Dick to power things just isn't really gonna cut it, and he said, "I wanna put in a 50-horsepower steam engine."

- Steam power was very new.

This was an explosive technology, and the townspeople who lived in Providence were not all that excited about bringing this new, unknown, possibly dangerous technology into the heart of the city.

- [Narrator] But with John's vision and persistence, the steam engine would eventually lead to the innovation that changed the face of silver forever.

(serene music) (lively music) As one of Earth's most precious metals, silver seduces the eyes with its luster, captures the imagination with its malleability, and makes one wanna reach out and touch it, perhaps to covet a bit of its brilliance for oneself.

For more than 150 years, few names have been as synonymous with silver as the Gorham Manufacturing Company.

- They were the largest and most important silver maker in the United States, at a time, the biggest in the world.

The amount of talent that was housed under Gorham's roof is extraordinary.

There are priceless objects of art that are absolutely breathtaking, that you just get all emotional about that anyone could make things this beautiful.

- [Narrator] A century before Gorham transformed the craft of silver making in America, British colonists such as Paul Revere, a silversmith long before his midnight ride, crafted utilitarian silverwares, like tankards, children's cups, and spoons.

- The most important piece of American jewelry is the spoon.

Because it was Quaker times, there was no fashion.

People were eating with their hands, and now they're eating with spoons.

These guys were making a lot of spoons.

- [Narrator] Aside from its functional value, a silver spoon could also be used as currency or held as collateral to pay debts.

- There were no banks in the early colonial world, and the silversmith was really the local banker of sorts.

- [Narrator] This demand for silverwares spurred a growth of silversmiths and small workshops throughout New England.

- Most jewelry at the time was memorial jewelry: "My wife passed away, here's a lock of her hair, make me a watch fob."

"My husband passed away, here's a lock of his hair, make me a brooch."

So these guys were all making hair jewelry, but when the spoons became popular, just think about it, it was just a big piece of jewelry, and they were making a good living on it, and people wanted them, there was a demand.

This was New England.

There was wealth from shipping, and Nantucket was next door, the richest county in America, because of whale oil.

- [Narrator] Two of the biggest influences on the jewelry industry in Rhode Island were Seril and Nehemiah Dodge.

- Every city in the world that produces artwork has a master.

Our original master was a man named Seril Dodge, and he was young, aggressive.

He was a major in the Revolutionary War.

He trained under the most famous watchmaker, Thomas Holland, and he was a little genius.

And when the Revolutionary War ended, our most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold, had burned down New London, and New London is where they imported and exported, and that was their major town.

Well, this Seril jumps in his horse and buggy and moves to Providence, Rhode Island, and opens up a shop, and takes over the town.

He built two beautiful homes, which are today the Providence Art Club.

Seril died very, very young, and Nehemiah, I speculate, inherited the workshop, and one of his most famous apprentices is Jabez Gorham.

- [Narrator] It was in this Renaissance of American jewelry in 1806, that young Jabez Gorham was sent off to become a jeweler's apprentice by his mother, Catherine.

- At 10 years old, his father dies, and it would have been very desirable, then, for his mother to be able to find a situation for her son that meant that he would get training, which he could now no longer get from a father, in a particular trade.

It also meant that she would not then be responsible for feeding another mouth.

And so at 14, she signs a pretty standard apprenticeship document.

- [Narrator] This document ensures that Jabez will learn from Nehemiah Dodge the art, trade, or mystery of gold, silversmith, and jewelry making.

In the contract, it states that he "shall not commit fornication, enter into matrimony, or play cards, dice, or any other unlawful game."

He is also not permitted to "haunt ale houses, taverns, or playhouses."

- This is very concerned with not just the education of this young man in a trade, but also that he will be a fine, upstanding member of society, and that he will reflect well on this person who has invested in him in taking on this apprenticeship.

- [Narrator] A year after his apprenticeship began, Jabez's mother died, leaving him an orphan and the youngest apprentice under Nehemiah's care.

A memoir written by Jabez's son, John, reads: "The other boys used to laugh at him because he had a whole year of Sundays before he would be 21 and free."

- These men understood that if you were going to be a jeweler or a silversmith, that you were gonna sit in front of a bench and saw for six months.

"Well, how come I can't file?"

You can't; and then you're gonna file for six months, and then you're gonna drill for six months.

And so you're talking about six or seven years of an apprenticeship program, done in a way where you weren't an expert until the end.

- Jabez says that Nehemiah was a kind master, so he fit into the household well, and he did not engage in matrimony.

He emerged at age 21 as a single guy who now had the ability and papers to call himself a silversmith.

- [Narrator] After a five-year partnership with four other men, Jabez struck out on his own, and eventually moved his workshop to 12 Steeple Street, in Providence.

As a jeweler, he gained a reputation for developing a new kind of gold chain unrivaled in quality.

- He was figuring out a way, by hand, to link gold together into what became known as Gorham chain, so that was a little advantage for him.

- [Narrator] To market his wares to the public, Jabez would rely on an essential class of tradesmen.

- Peddlers would come to him at 12 Steeple Street, and buy his wares, and sell those across the region.

- [Narrator] Unfortunately, this was not enough to save Jabez the trouble of having to peddle his own wares.

- When you're doing this peddling, you could be on the road for months at a time.

You're going to a community, you're waiting for the next carriage that is going to Brattleboro, and this takes an extraordinary amount of time.

Even if you were going from Providence just to Boston, you might be looking at 11 hours in one of these coaches.

- Jabez would arrange to go to a room in a Boston hotel, spread what they had done in the last several months on the bed, and the retailers in Boston would choose from them and then pay him off, and then he'd go back to Providence and make some more.

- [Narrator] In letters to his wife, Amy, Jabez would lament the hardships of life on the road.

On a visit to Hartford on October 21st, 1819, he wrote: "I have been busy almost all day, and all I could make out to sell was $39.

Hard work to do that.

I am almost discouraged already."

In other letters, his thoughts were with his family.

"Wipe Amanda's nose with a soft handkerchief so as not to make it sore.

Tell Jabez to be a good boy.

If he does not, I shall give the cowhide when I get back.

Take good care of my pig and little babe."

His wife replied, "Lucy was here last evening.

She said she supposed you wanted to see the hog more than anyone else."

The following year, on November 18th, 1820, Amy gave birth to their third child, John.

Eight days later, she would die of complications, never bearing witness to the greatness that her infant son and the Gorham family name would achieve.

John grew up in an era of US history that reflected a sense of national purpose and unity, and witnessed the gains of the Industrial Revolution.

- His first memory is actually in his father's workshop, standing on the workbench and watching the parade for General Lafayette going down North Main Street, out of the window.

- [Narrator] Over the years, John would see his father's jewelry business slowly grow, until 1831, when Jabez decided to add coin silver spoons to his line.

- He partners with a guy, last name of Webster, from Boston, and Webster's specialty is silver spoons.

- [Narrator] The company prospered over the next decade, proving the addition of silver spoons to be lucrative.

The spoons of the era were made from melted coins, often in a very simple style, such as the fiddle or coffin handles.

- The silver coin from which coin silver was derived came from Mexico, South America.

They were actual currencies, and as they kinda got worn out, they hauled them to New York, where there were silver brokers.

You would see the silver brokers' messengers shoving whale barrels full of silver coin from a bank to the silver broker.

- Jabez would go down to New York, and later, it was John that went to New York, and they just bought bushelsful to melt down and turn into spoons.

- [Narrator] The silver coins were melted, rolled to the proper thickness, and then hammered into shape.

Each spoon had to be heated nine times before it was finished.

An experienced silversmith like Henry Webster could hammer out about a dozen spoons per day.

No two, however, were exactly alike in shape or weight.

Aside from the material from which coin silver flatware was derived, the term also referred to the quality standard.

Until 1850, Gorham's coin silver standard was 800 fine, or 80% silver-20% copper.

This changed to 900 fine, until they adopted the English sterling standard of 925.

Gorham was one of the first companies in the US to implement the use of sterling silver, in 1868, giving them an edge with a higher-quality product.

To identify the makers of silverwares, companies would stamp each individual piece with a hallmark.

- Gorham used a lion, anchor, and a G to designate their company.

That was their company mark, and you'd find it on almost everything they did.

- [Narrator] This mark was in use as early as 1848, the lion adopted from the English sterling mark, the anchor taken from the emblem of the state of Rhode Island, and a capital G for the Gorham family name.

In 1837, John was brought into his father's business to learn the trade of jewelry making.

Less than a year later, his apprenticeship was cut short when he clashed with the foreman.

- A foreman was a very valuable person, and really understood the process, and if an 18-year-old kid was not getting on with the foreman, even if he was the son of the owner, he was gonna go.

- I think, even at that point, he might have been having ideas about how to do things differently, and in his estimation, better.

- [Narrator] Out of the family business, John was forced to find other employment opportunities, initially as a farmer, and then as a clerk in various shops throughout Providence, New York, and Boston.

- And it seemed like a respectable job, he got to wear a coat and tie, but it was actually a miserable job.

You act pretty powerless.

There was not much upward mobility in it.

and John Gorham figured that out pretty quickly.

- [Narrator] After 35 years of jewelry making, Jabez, with no apparent heir to his business, sold his interest in the company to local jewelers, Metcalf & Church, and left Webster to make silver spoons.

And here is where the story of Gorham could have ended, with Jabez comfortably retired, and John serving out the rest of his years as a clerk, if not for one critical decision on the part of Henry Webster.

- Webster got an opportunity to return to his native Boston to run the largest silver spoon company at the time, and he really wanted to do it.

- [Narrator] Eager to seize the opportunity, Webster asked Jabez to buy his share of the company.

Jabez agreed, under one condition, that John join him in the endeavor.

- After trying his hand at farming, clerkship, he was like, "Well, you know what?

Maybe dad's trade isn't such a bad idea."

- He ended up coming back to his father's firm and joining, in 1841, at which point it became J. Gorham & Son.

- [Narrator] This time around, father and son would focus primarily on silver, and John would have the authority to take the company to new heights.

The mid-19th century proved to be a fortuitous time for the silver trade.

The country was finally recovering from the financial panic of 1837, and the tariff of 1842 increased taxes on certain imported goods, including silver, to 30%.

- It shuts imports out of the market, and it has another benefit for the silversmiths, too, because these tariffs, which were applied to multiple different goods, had to be paid for in gold or silver coin.

- [Narrator] With the US Treasury flooded with coin, the raw material of silver manufacturers, and foreign competition derailed, J. Gorham & Son saw a 350% spike in sales after only four short years.

The father and son team oversaw roughly a dozen men and 10 young women in their small workshop on 12 Steeple Street.

The premises housed manufacturing on the first floor, burnishing in the attic, and a power source in the basement, that power source comprised of a shaft driven by their faithful horse, Old Dick.

- You literally have a horse in your basement.

That horse walks in a circle, and can walk at different speeds, turning their turbine, if you will, faster and faster, or slower, to provide more power to the machinery that is connected, then, with belts to that central source of power.

- [Narrator] Gorham used this machinery to make a variety of wares, including a relatively new addition to the dining table, the fork.

- Very few Americans would've eaten with a fork, or even seen one, never mind eaten with one, because a fork is a really complex thing to make by hand.

- [Narrator] For 19th-century New Englanders, knives and spoons were the common eating implements.

Knives were used for cutting, securing, and eating directly from the blade.

- According to an article that was written about the rather bad manners of Americans, there was this story about the way men, in particular, handled their forks.

- [Narrator] An article published in the Dublin Penny Journal recounts a foreigner's visit to New York: "surprised to hear calls from all sides for forks, the use of which I could not divine, as I had already seen that the American has no need of them for eating, but uses his knife alone, with wonderful dexterity.

A waiter brought several plates full of forks and set them in the middle of the table.

The gentlemen immediately fell upon the forks.

Each secured one, rose, and repaired to some part of the room, and began at their ease to pick their teeth and pare their nails."

Eventually, Americans did catch on to the correct use of the fork.

The addition of this new utensil, along with more refined eating habits, brought about a greater desire for patterned flatware.

Gorham used the antiquated and time-consuming process of decorating the handles by hammering them into a pattern cut die.

For more intricate designs, such as the Prince Albert pattern, Gorham looked outside the company.

- They were working with a silversmith in New York named Michael Gibney, who was a flatware designer, and he made some of the flatware for Gorham at that time.

- [Narrator] Gibney's machinery made all the difference.

He would run the partially finished blanks through roller-dies, and send them back to Providence to be completed.

John, however, found Gibney's work to be rough and expensive, which drove him to purchase his own rolling presses for Gorham.

By 1847, the company had outgrown the small workshop on Steeple Street.

Production was increasing, quarters were cramped, and their faithful horse had been overworked.

- John looked around, and he said, "Dad, we need a bigger plant, we need a bigger place."

And he convinced his father to borrow $17,000 and build a whole four-story brick building on Steeple Street.

- [Narrator] John believed that "if progress was to be made and the business extended, there must be a revolution in the method of manufacturing."

To make this a reality, he insisted that "steam power was a necessity."

Initially, Jabez went along with the idea, but according to John, began to fully realize the magnitude of the undertaking, and became exceedingly nervous.

- Jabez got afraid.

"This is not what I know.

There might be too much power in that."

It's like the difference between a horse-drawn carriage and a car.

- He started getting cold feet as other people in downtown Providence were like, "Jabez, these things have a propensity to explode.

I don't know that I wanna be in close proximity to one."

And so Jabez was like, "John, this business of borrowing money to build this thing and put in steam power, I'm a little scared of it."

- [Narrator] By midsummer, Jabez withdrew from the company and sold his entire interest to John for $8,000, ensuring that he would be harmless from all actions, costs, and expenses.

- It seems to be an amicable split, but his father retires in this period after a very successful career.

- Jabez was just not ready to embrace the future.

He just thought it was too much.

He didn't want the anxiety of worrying about something failing.

John was very much a risk-taker, and that's why Gorham became the company it did, because he was willing to take those risks in ways that Jabez was never going to do.

- [Narrator] With Jabez retired, John found a new partner, a cousin from his mother's side, Gorham Thurber.

Thurber brought with him experience as a bookkeeper for the Franklin Foundry & Machine Company, along with $16,000 of fresh capital to invest in the newly renamed Gorham & Thurber.

With Thurber tending to the bookkeeping and day-to-day operations of the new factory, John turned his attention to the machinery that could now be powered by his steam engine.

- John Gorham was a visionary.

He wanted to expand the company.

He also wanted to modernize the company, and to bring in mechanization allowed them to become the largest silver company in the world.

- Some historians have speculated, in fact, that there's a benefit to John not having been a trained silversmith.

It meant that he's coming, in a way, from the outside, and he is not held back, the way he would say his father may have been, by the traditions of this kind of work.

- You know, I think the generational shift comes into play with this technology.

John is very much interested in what's going on right now, and how we can use these developments and make different things, new things, not the same old coins, melting them down and making them into silver spoons, but make all kinds of things, make fancy teapots, like they're making already in England.

- Those influences influenced people like John.

"I gotta see this.

We gotta do this."

This is America."

And don't forget, Europe was a boutique society, which it still is today, and we were becoming a mass merchandise society, which we still are today.

John wanted to put a teapot on every table, and he needed production to do that.

- [Narrator] A keen observer and adapter of technology, John added the spinning lathe to Gorham's production line.

This allowed the company to offer consumers large tea and coffee services that were much faster and cost-effective to create than a craftsman tediously hammering by hand.

- Their first hollowware, the Providence Journal Company called it really exquisite and beautiful, but a 20th-century critic, Charles Carpenter, called it squat and dumpy (laughs), but it was American-made hollowware, which was pretty uncommon in the early 1850s.

- [Narrator] The service was a Rococo Revival tea set in "the old Chinese pattern."

- The Gorham design style in the early 1850s was the standard Rococo Revival style that was popular, really, everywhere along the Atlantic seaboard in the United States.

- [Guest speaker] Rococo is the 18th-century French style that is very complex, very ornate.

Almost the entire surface of the vessel would be covered with some sort of decoration.

- [Narrator] To produce this highly intricate decoration, silversmiths relied on a technique known as chasing.

- Chasing is a method of ornamenting silver by hammering.

There's repoussé chasing, which is pushing out from inside the eat piece, and then there's surface chasing that's done from the outside in.

In both of these techniques, you don't remove any silver, you're just pushing it around, using specialized tools.

[Guest speaker] With engraving, you're actually removing metal, you're carving into the metal, and it's primarily two-dimensional, unless you're also engraving into a chased area that may give the piece a little bit more life.

- Chasing has always been the prestige occupation in silver.

You have to be very good at what you do, because if a chaser messes up, the whole object has to be melted down and start over again.

- [Guest Speaker] John understood that I can take that same man and instead of making him make that angel face in a teapot, how about he makes it into that block of steel and we make 40 teapots.

So the whole modus of chasing as art was gonna move from the artistic finished product to the tool and die-roll.

- [Narrator] 1852 proved to be a pivotal year for the company.

John and Gorham Thurber invited another cousin, Louis Dexter Jr., to become a third partner in the firm, changing the name once again to Gorham & Company.

Dexter would bring with him more investment capital and another set of eyes to help oversee operations.

More than ever, John was free to concentrate his efforts on process.

- And he says, "Okay, this is nice, we're spinning up hollowware, but I have an idea for how to make silverware, flatware, a lot faster than we're doing.

I want to develop some machinery that allows us to handle silver as though it were putty."

And he tells this to his cousins, and he says, "And in order to do this, I'm going to go to England."

- The primary reason for taking that trip was to find the machinery for his new factory.

- He's going, at this period, where he's thinking about steam power, where he's thinking about industry and innovation, and he's read about James Nasmyth, who's over there, making these steam powered hammers, and he's thinking, "How can I apply this to the industry that I work in."

- [Narrator] On May 1st, 1852, John stood on the warves of lower Manhattan, ready to board the SS Arctic for the long journey to England.

- He gets on this paddle wheel steamer, it has a paddle wheel on each side, and he's fascinated by how this thing works.

He says, "I have a little 50-horsepower steam engine, but this thing is a behemoth compared to mine."

And he wants to see it, so he creeps down a couple of floors below deck first day out to sea, and one of the firemen down there looks at him, and he says, "It's right warm down here, sir."

He says, "Usually, when passengers come down here, they'll give us a fine or a treat."

The guy wants a little money.

So John says, "Okay, here is a half a dollar," and then he can look around.

So John's taking copious notes, and then another guy comes up, better dressed, he's an officer, and he says, "We don't usually have passengers down here, sir."

And John says, "Well, I just paid the treat."

And he says, "No, sir."

He says, "Only officers are authorized for that.

He had no right to do that, sir."

Now he wants his treat.

So John really gets disgusted, and he feeds up one floor, to, actually, the crew lounge.

From there, he can peer down into the steam engine, and he takes copious notes about the number of boilers, the number of fire tenders.

- [Narrator] In his diary, John wrote of the paddle steamer's engine "What a monster, a regular Goliath, and my engine, a Tom Thumb.

Now for the deck and be sick!"

- Once he gets over seasickness, he has a blast.

He talks about the phosphorous trails trailing both sides of the paddle wheel at night, and observes and logs whales and icebergs, and the Northern Lights.

He really has a good time.

And he also logs every type of silver that's served in the dining room, the patterns, who the makers were.

- [Narrator] After 11 days at sea, John arrived safely in Liverpool.

Instead of heading directly to Nasmyth, he took a detour to study manufacturing techniques.

- [Guest speaker] He sees silver plating, and he learns how to use electrical charge to draw silver onto sheets, and he goes to a place and actually works very hard for a couple of weeks, learning the trade of molding in sand.

- He also went to museums and bookstores and acquired design books, and looked at artwork in museums.

And this is just the beginning of national museums in Europe, so he's really on the cutting edge of trying to inform the factory's production by studying history and contemporary design at the same time.

- [Narrator] After satisfying his thirst for knowledge, John was ready to seek out the ingenious engineer and toolmaker, James Nasmyth.

- He had no introduction whatsoever, but showed up and explained to Mr. Nasmyth what he wanted to do.

- John Gorham had seen how some silversmiths used a rudimentary drop press to inculcate patterns on flatware.

- They were spooning, and bowling, and doing little ditzy jobs, and men picked them up with a rope, and dropped it with gravity.

But John was looking for tonnage.

- What he had in mind was some kind of a piston-driven device that would drop that heavy head and lift it up again, and, of course, Nasmyth was the perfect person to talk to, and he must have realized this.

And according to Gorham, Nasmyth says, "I have been waiting for a person to come here and suggest something like this.

In fact, I've suggested it to the local silversmiths around here, and they're so hidebound, and stuck in their 18th-century English craft guild ways that they wouldn't listen to me."

- The guy was making hammers 10 times bigger to press out cannons.

He said, "Oh, you want me to make a little one for your little spoon business?"

So it was actually small to the level that Nasmyth was doing.

- You're still talking a hundreds-of-pound head that's going to fire down, and raise up, and fire down, and as it does, it's going to inculcate an obverse and reverse side of a die that will smash into blanks holding silver, patterns, and now, bam, you've got your spoon, you've got your knife, you've even got forks.

- [Guest speaker] Making a spoon with a drop press would happen immediately.

Within a flash, you would have a spoon.

Now it still had to be finished and polished, but you had the pattern and the shape of the implement itself already created.

Compared to making a spoon completely by hand, this was an incredible time-saving mechanism.

- [Narrator] Nasmyth eagerly agreed to create John's steam-powered drop press.

Within a few years, his new machine was hard at work stamping out decorated flatware.

- This meant that they could make many pieces of flatware very quickly, and this was the beginning of what propelled them to become, ultimately, the largest silver company in the world.

- [Narrator] By the mid-19th century, Providence was a booming center for inventors and manufacturers.

- A member of the Providence Board of Trade boastfully but truthfully bragged that Providence was home to the five industrial wonders of the world, the largest companies of their type.

You had Brown & Sharpe, one of the largest machine tool companies, Corliss Steam Engine was still going in the 1880s, Nicholson File, which had its roots in Brown & Sharpe, American Screw Company banging out its patented gimlet screws.

And then, of course, you have the largest silversmith company in the world in Gorham Silver.

- They are producing goods that help each other do their work.

A shop like Brown & Sharpe, and the innovation that is coming out of Brown & Sharpe, they are making machines there for the other factories to do their work, and do it better.

- [Narrator] By the mid-1850s, the company was mass producing new lines of wares.

With production in full swing, a sales force was put in place to sell Gorham silver across the nation.

- They traversed hundreds of miles, they carried objects with them, and they were targeting retail jewelers, small retailers, but also big ones, like Tiffany & Company, and Ball & Black.

- [Narrator] To assist their sales force, Gorham made use of beautifully illustrated catalogs.

- Gorham used their own catalogs in multiple ways.

One was to get a jewelry shop or a retail outlet across the country to stock their wares, and to be able to promote them.

But then they were used for the public, because if you came into a shop and you said you were interested in a silver pattern for a wedding, or for an anniversary, or something like that, they would bring these catalogs out.

- The first catalogs included a lot of illustrations, a lot of engravings, a lot of lithographs of objects.

It wasn't until later that you start to see photography enter into the catalogs.

- The advent of photography is 1839, and then the first real photo studio in Providence is right after that.

- [Narrator] As the popularity of photography expanded, John capitalized on this opportunity by opening his own photo studio on the top floor of 12 Steeple Street sometime between 1855 and 1856.

The initial plan was to photograph Gorham's wares.

- If you're making three-dimensional objects back in the 1860s, the only way to document it is with photography.

Otherwise you'd have to hire a wood engraver or a painter to, like, paint the object, which would take forever.

With photography, it's done in a minute, and then you've got a plate that you can reproduce.

- Every piece that was created would be sent to the photo studio, would be documented, and then those photographs would be printed out, and they would be sent with the traveling salesmen.

- They would most likely have some examples of the silver that they made, but then they could show the vast array of things that the manufacturing company was starting to produce by showing photographs of all of the pieces.

- [Narrator] Although an enormous boon to Gorham's operations, photography also brought the company a legal dispute.

In 1867, Gorham was accused of using a patented device to produce multiple photographic prints at the same time.

- A Providence photographer, A.E.

Alden, sues Gorham, and says, "Ho, wait a minute, I paid for the right to use this patented device, and yet you're using it, and you didn't pay that money."

Gorham's photographer, William Coleman, says in his defense, "I tinkered with the model.

It's my own invention."

- [Narrator] This patented technology provided a competitive edge during an era when photography was seen as a form of popular entertainment.

- Gorham really capitalized on this need for popular entertainments by opening up their studio and making it accessible to the public, "And by the way, as you're in here getting your photograph taken, we can tell you about our products, and here are some Gorham brochures, and here are..." Maybe there's a finished piece or two, or they need to talk to the photographer about the pieces that they're making.

So it's a little bit of marketing work that's going on while they're doing something else.

- [Narrator] After six or seven years photographing the public, John concluded that it was an unprofitable enterprise.

He realigned the photography studio to exclusively serve Gorham's cataloging and marketing needs.

With production expanding and domestic sales booming, John realized that an in-house designer was paramount to Gorham's success.

- John Gorham felt that Europe was way ahead of the United States, and he wanted the cutting-edge design for his company.

- He needed to bring someone into the company to lead the design department and to guide the stylistic endeavors of the company.

In 1857, he brings George Wilkinson into Gorham, and he really becomes, I think we could say, the first in-house designer.

- The reason he wanted in-house designers was so he, again, had a competitive edge on his rivals, because these designs would be exclusive to Gorham.

- [Narrator] Wilkinson had studied at the prestigious Birmingham Society of Artists.

Known as the workshop of the world, Birmingham was the center of the United kingdom's metalworking industry.

He was brought to the United States in 1854 to work for the Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts making swords and cutlery.

- It probably wasn't the best fit for his artistic abilities, and after sort of moving around a bit, John Gorham hired him.

- He gives him a 300% raise to leave the Ames Company and come to work for Gorham.

And it turned out to be a smart move, because George Wilkinson looks at what Gorham's producing, what a 20th-century critic called kind of short, dumpy, Rococo pieces, and he changes that to a neoclassical design.

- [Guest speaker] In the period, it was called neo-Grec, and it's a style that is based on classical sources and imagery, and it was a very popular style in the late 1850s and 1860s in Britain and France.

- He is not only bringing his knowledge of what is popular in Europe, but also bringing the silversmithing skills that will allow the company to diversify.

- Gorham is not the only company making silver in the neo-Grec style, but Wilkinson's designs, I think, are particularly exemplary.

- [Narrator] Aside from Wilkinson, John hired many skilled craftsmen from Germany, France, and England.

These immigrants made up almost a third of Gorham's workforce by the late 1860s, and were key to producing a vast array of highly-ornamented wares.

To sell those wares, Gorham relied on an army of traveling salesmen and a small wholesale showroom at 12 Steeple Street.

Now the company saw an opportunity to sell directly to the public.

- So in 1856, John Gorham and Mr. Thurber, they partner with Henry Brown here in Providence, and they open their first retail venture, called Gorham Company & Brown, located on Westminster Street.

- [Narrator] The store, which later became the popular Tilden-Thurber, housed luxury items from all over the world alongside Gorham's magnificent silverwares.

On his second trip to Europe, in 1860, John noted in his diary the vast array of goods that he purchased for the store, from ivories, to bronzes, to opera glasses.

He had been purchasing knickknacks all day, carefully selected to entice the passers-by.

- [Guest speaker] Early window displays were just crammed full of product, and I think Gorham and other manufacturers really sort of capitalized on the fact that there was now more leisure time for the working public.

You would be attracted by something by strolling the streets and looking in windows that would actually draw you in.

- [Narrator] The success of this retail store prompted Gorham to establish their presence outside of Providence.

In 1859, they opened a wholesale office in New York's jewelry district, allowing retailers to replenish their supply while visiting the city.

A year later, Gorham moved across the street to an expanded showroom at 3 Maiden Lane.

This would prove to be a fruitful endeavor, according to an article in the Atlantic Monthly, which noted: "On Christmas morning, there was left in the store but $7 worth of ware out of an average stock of one hundred thousand dollars."

(canon booms) (military march music) On April 20th, 1861, over 1,000 men from the 1st Rhode Island Infantry lined up at Exchange Place in Providence to march off to war.

Rumblings of a civil war had already caused silver sales to drop precipitously, and Gorham was dealt a significant financial blow.

Employees were laid off, and Lewis Dexter withdrew from the partnership, taking his capital with him.

- This is not a period of great output for companies like Gorham, but you often see, in this period, innovation, because you actually have a slowing down of production that can allow you to go into what we might think of as a research and development period.

- John took advantage of that, in a way, by thinking back to his trip in England 11 years previously, and dragging out from his notes what he learned about electroplating.

- [Narrator] Electroplating is the process of depositing a thin layer of precious metal, in this case, silver, over a base metal, such as copper, using electricity.

The Elkington company in Birmingham, England, were the leaders in this industry, and patented the process in 1840.

- He's actually trying to figure out how Elkington is doing their silverplating, and Elkington won't let him in the factory to find out.

- Elkington's patents on a lot of things all ran out in about 1860, so all of a sudden, in the next five years, you see John Gorham go in the electroplating business.

- [Guest speaker] That brought down the cost, because, of course, you weren't using as much silver to make something look like it was made of silver.

- [Narrator] Gorham promoted their electroplated silver as being the finest in the industry.

They plated their wares with four times as much silver as standard, a process known as quadruple plate.

- [Guest speaker] There are several instances in which the same design was made in both sterling and in electroplate, - For those who were poor in purse but great in aspiration, actually, silver plate was a great choice.

- [Narrator] By 1863, Gorham's sales were at a record high, nearly quadrupling since the start of the war.

The two remaining partners, John Gorham and Gorham Thurber, decided to incorporate as the Gorham Manufacturing Company, each with equal shares and joint control.

(train chuffing) (train whistle blowing) The latter part of the 19th century saw great expansion of the railroads.

This meant that refrigerated boxcars could now bring fresh and exotic foods across the country.

To meet the demand for these foods, Gorham began to expand their line of utensils.

- There are orange spoons, there are orange knives.

There are oysters that are being shipped on these refrigerated boxcars, so there are pieces to eat oysters with.

There are all kinds of innovations.

And part of this is a marketing thing, and part of it is the wonder of having these foods all year round or not having to travel for them.

- [Narrator] Ice became a useful commodity, not only to refrigerate the foods on these boxcars, but also to ship around the country to people's homes.

- Certainly, metropolitan areas and beyond had some kind of an icebox in which the iceman would cometh, and bring his block of ice to keep your food cold.

Gorham produced a really spectacular ice bowl, and because it looks like a gigantic iceberg, it conjures up all the excitement of the Arctic, a faraway place.

- When you look at serving utensils, there can be a pastry server, a meat server, a macaroni spoon.

And when you think about it today, it sounds a little extravagant to have an implement for specific food types, but that was the Victorian era, and there were very particular thoughts about how one should dine.

When you think about it from a manufacturer's standpoint, it's brilliant, because you can't use one spoon for everything, you need multiple forms of this, of that, to serve this type of food properly, thus you could sell more pieces of flatware and more pieces of serving utensils.

- [Narrator] To appeal to the growing middle class' sense of novelty, Gorham offered everything from celery vases, to ice cream hatchets, to terrapin tureens.

- One of, if not the largest, services that Gorham made was the Furber service.

- [Guest speaker] It was magnificent, it was large, and it was ambitious.

- [Narrator] This extraordinary collection was commissioned from 1866 to 1880 by Henry Jewitt and Elvira Irwin Furber.

Coming from humble beginnings, Henry made his fortune in the emerging insurance business.

To lavishly entertain their guests, they amassed an 816-piece Gorham silver service designed to serve 24 people.

- [Guest speaker] What's fascinating about the service is it's ordered over a decade of time, and the styles change as they're ordering the pieces of it, so you go from the neo-Grec style to the Japanese style in one family's dining silver.

- [Guest speaker] There are 129 pieces of hollowware, so that would be any vessel used to serve food, vases for flowers, as well as decorative pieces, and there are 687 pieces of flatware and serving utensils.

- [Narrator] A variety of designers worked on the Furber service over the course of 14 years.

The most well-known was Thomas Pairpoint, recruited by Gorham from England.

- [Guest speaker] Pairpoint seems to have upped the ante on the neo-Grec style.

The pieces that Gorham made after his arrival have much more figural decoration, especially 3-dimensional figural decoration.

So if you think of things like the Furber service centerpieces or the century vase that was made for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, which are just awash in 3-dimensional classical figures, that was all Pairpoint's design.

- [Narrator] Back on the dining table, Gorham achieved great success with their medallion pattern.

Created by Wilkinson in the 1860s, this highly decorative 3-dimensional pattern featured round medallions with ancient cameo profiles.

Gorham was not the first or only silver company to create a medallion pattern, but few were as lucrative as Wilkinson's design.

Equipped with stunning flatware, the newly-converted middle class would now require the knowledge of how to present it.

- How to set a table properly was a source of a major concern for middle class households, and they turned to etiquette books for advice.

There were two main services that were known and practiced.

- Formal dinners used to be served dining a la Francaise, and all of the food would be put on the table in the serving vessels.

- [Guest speaker] In that circumstance, the host would pass food, and the other parties would pass food amongst themselves, and it was very heavy and time-consuming work, and it also took several hours, at its best.

- [Guest speaker] In the late 19th century, dining a la Russe became very popular, and all of those serving dishes were put on some type of a sideboard, which left a lot of empty space on the dining table, and they filled that dining space with decorative items, centerpieces, candelabra, and vast array of flatware and serving utensils.

- Several courses were presented one after the other.

You needed servants to bring every course forward.

The servants did all the cutting of the meat, for instance, and then they served them one by one to each of the diners.

So this actually required considerably more dinnerware and provided many more opportunities for silversmiths like Gorham to produce far more wares than they had in the past.

- [Narrator] To meet this high demand, Gorham moved away from using silver coins and took advantage of the phenomenon that hit the US in the mid-19th century.

- They discovered gold in California in 1849, and silver came along with that.

And then they'd start discovering silver in Nevada, the Comstock Lode, and that happens in the very early 1860s.

They'd start discovering huge, huge veins of silver, and they'd start mining that.

The cost of silver comes down.

The Comstock Lode helps pay for the Civil War.

- [Guest speaker] That just set off a silver fever, so people started finding silver mines in Colorado and Arizona, and it really starts to flood the market.

- [Narrator] The Gorham Manufacturing Company wasn't alone in taking advantage of this opportunity.

John Gorham himself invested, with his brother-in-law, Isaac Thurber, in the Thurber Mining Company, and encouraged friends and family, including his sister, to do the same.

- He kind of goes all in on the Thurber Mining Company, and he was gonna strike it rich mining precious metals in Virginia.

Well, it didn't happen.

- [Narrator] In 1868, an agent from R.G.

Dun & Company, the predecessor of Dun & Bradstreet, reported that John Gorham's Thurber mine speculation is believed by some to be a swindle.

Although it's doubtful that the Thurber Mining Company was ever a swindle, there's no doubt that it caused John a grave amount of debt.

He was forced to turn to the Gorham Company for help.

- "I need some money from the company now.

I want to pay off the Thurber Mining debts, and my collateral is my stock."

Well, he lost the stock.

- [Narrator] Bankruptcy, a dreaded word for anyone to declare, and for John Gorham, a 19th-century gentleman and the president of the Gorham Manufacturing Company, it was an extreme embarrassment.

- John couldn't stop.

That's the disease of a serial entrepreneur, and he was a serial entrepreneur.

His investment in the silver mines, his risk-taking, at a stage of life, it caught up with him, as it does to many serial entrepreneurs.

By no means was he any different at the end.

He was sad, he was broke, but he was still a great man that went down the tubes.

- [Narrator] Following his discharge from voluntary bankruptcy, John hoped to give Gorham his undivided services once again.

Unfortunately, the company didn't want them.

Although the board was sympathetic to his financial condition, they put it on record that the company was not in the slightest degree responsible.

John felt their actions to be an injustice, leaving him with nothing to show for his life's work.

- I have to imagine there was great sadness on his behalf to be asked to leave the company that he had brought so far along, that had been founded by his father.

But at that point, the Gorham family was no longer involved in the company.

- It's a real shame, because they threw away their heritage when they threw out John Gorham.

- [Narrator] No one can deny the impact that John had on the company.

With his vision, he revolutionized an industry and brought Gorham to heights it would never have known.

But now, with their leader removed, the Gorham Manufacturing Company would look to a young sales executive in New York to take them out of the workshop and into the 20th century.

On the next episode of "Chasing Silver": - It was Jurassic.

It was the biggest effort in making an artistic metal building in the world.

- Codman, with the support of Edward Holbrook, comes up with the idea of creating the Martele line.

- So here you're making the most civil Martele silver stuff ever made, and you're also making bullet casings to kill people with.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Chasing Silver: The Story of Gorham" has been provided in part by: - [Announcer] Our story began 70 years ago.

For decades, our fine jewelry has been curated from around the globe.

At Ross-Simons, we believe that every piece of our jewelry can be part of your story.

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