Boulsover, Thomas

Thomas Boulsover, Boulsover also spelled Bolsover, (born 1706, Elkington, Derbyshire, Eng.—died September 1788, Sheffield), English inventor of fused plating, or “old Sheffield plate.”

After an apprenticeship in Sheffield, Boulsover became a member of the Cutlers Company, i.e., a full-fledged craftsman, in 1727. In 1743, while repairing a copper and silver knife handle, he discovered that the two metals could be fused and, equally important, the fact that when the fused metals were rolled in a rolling mill, they expanded in unison, behaving as if they were a single metal. Previously, coating or plating one metal with another had involved fabricating the article into a finished shape and then soldering a thin sheet of the plating to it. Boulsover’s invention opened the way to economical production of a great variety of plated objects, from buttons and snuffboxes, which Boulsover himself made, to hollow ware and utensils, which were soon manufactured in large quantity by other Sheffield workers. Boulsover later invented a method of rolling saw-blade steel, previously made only by hand hammering.