The story we tell today ends in a Company named Contelettrich, which is specialized in thermal and galvanic treatments for metal, such as silver and nickel plating for the industrial sector. But as its narrator, that very Compant knows that it is a story which must be told starting from a long time ago, and in a very different context… even in another Nation than is native Italy.

Yes, because this story begins in 1743, in Sheffield, England, and to be more precise, it begins at the table where Thomas Boulsover of the Sheffield's Cutlers Company, one of the most important Silver Crafters' guild in the Kingdom of England, is working. And as often is the case, it begins with a mistake: while repairing the handle of a customer's decorative knife, Mr. Boulsover overheats it, and the silver begins to melt. When, after cooling it, and probably quite worried about the mishap, the craftsman begins to check on the damage, he notices something that puzzles him: under the intense heat, the silver and the copper in the handle have fused to each other so strongly that, as he notices testing them, they behave in the same way and can even be hammered and bent together, although they are visibly separate in two distinct layers.

It is a matter of litte time and much intuition for Boulsover to obtain funds (from a Strelley Pegge, of the Beauchief district, history tells us) and go into business to continue his experiments. He is rewarded with a triumph: he discovers that he can coat copper ingots with a thin sheet of silver, and heat them to fuse them to each other. After such treatment, when laminated in sheets, the two metals behave as one, becoming thin copper sheets completely covered in a thin layer of silver. Soon Boulsover holds in hand the first silvered buttons produced by his procedure: they are almost indistinguishable by the silver ones, but they only cost a tiny fraction of the original.

At this point our story proceeds quite serenely, with the new product, named "Sheffield Plate", conquering wider and wider slices of the market, until, one century later, a man appears by the name of John Wright. He lives in Birmingham, (another Englishman!) and he is a surgeon by trade - but an amateur inventor. He is fascinated by the dawning technology of electro-metallurgy, and he develops in his laboratory a new plating technique, based on a Potassium Cyanide solution. It might go down as just an amateur's triumph, were it not for a Mr. George Elkington, who's been in the silver-plating craft for 25 years with his family business, noticing it. Upon learning of the procedure that Wright has developed, Elkington immediately realizes its potential commercial applications, and quickly buys the rights from the surgeon, securing the technology under a patent. The following year, he opens a new Company, which will employ, before the end of the century, a thousand workers .

And what about today? Nowadays, silver and nickel plating, and all similar treatments, are no longer limited to the crafting of low-cost cutlery and jewelry. The Industrial sector requires tools that, while being economical, can resist corrosion, are particularly hard, have low fiction, boast high conductivity… all of them needs which can be satisfied by simple applications of that plating technology whose story we just told.

Who knows if Boulsover ever imagined that ruining a knife would lead to such incredible results…