George Adams
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1840 — 1883
William Chawner II's son-in-law who took over Chawner & Co. with his mother-in-law Mary Chawner. He took over the firm and registered his first mark in 1840. He was an exhibitor at the 1851 Great Exhibition and the company became one of the largest producers of quality silver flatware in...
Frederick Scott Archer
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1813 — 1857
Frederick Archer was an Englishman who apprenticed as a bullion dealer and silversmith. He moved on to work as a sculptor creating busts of well known people. In 1847 he began using photography as an aid for this work. He was unsatisfied with the calotype process and the paper negative. In 1849...
David Austin Sayre
United States
Date of Birth: 1793 — 1870
David Austin Sayre (March 12, 1793 - September, 1870) was a prominent silversmith, banker and educator. Sayre is best remembered as founder of Sayre Female Institute.
Juana Barraza
Mexico
Date of Birth: Dec 27, 1957
Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperio is a Mexican serial killer known as "La Mataviejitas" (The Little Old Lady Killer). She was sentenced to 759 years in prison for the killing of 16 elderly women. Sentences imposed in Mexican courts are generally served concurrently, but the maximum sentence under...
Hester Bateman
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1708 — 1794
The most famous woman silversmith, Bateman was the widow of John Bateman. After his death in 1760, she took over his London-based metalwork business and transformed it into one of the most successful and prolific silversmithing workshops in London. Hester and her sons were known for their...
Richard Beard
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1801 — 1885
Richard Beard was an entrepreneur who profitably established himself in the coal trade in London. With his entrepreneurial spirit, in 1841, he paid Louis Daguerre 150 pounds for a license to use his technology. He set up photography as a business speculation and opened the world's first...
Ross J. Beaty, C.M.
Canada
Date of Birth: 1951 — -
Throughout his 48-year career, Ross Beaty has been a leader in the international mining and renewable energy industries, making a significant and lasting impact in BC and around the world.
After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1979 in geology and law, Ross began a...
Charles Harper Bennett
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1840 — 1927
Charles Bennett was an English photographic pioneer. He improved the gelatine silver process developed by Richard Leach Maddox. In 1873 he created a method of hardening the emulsion, making it more resistant to friction, and larger. In 1878 he discovered that by prolonged heating the sensitivity...
Robert Jefferson Bingham
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1824 — 1870
Robert Bingham was an English pioneer photographer, mainly active in France, making portraits and reproductions of paintings. He had a background in chemistry and was particularly interested in photographic processes and published a treatise on this subject in 1848. He later became the first...
Henry Birks
Canada
Date of Birth: 1879
Birks was by far the largest and most influential Canadian silversmith in the 20th century. Henry Birks & Company was established in Montreal in 1879 as a retail jeweler. It became Henry Birks & Sons in 1893 when his three sons joined the business. In 1897 Birks bought out Hendery & Leslie,...
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard
France
Date of Birth: 1802 — 1872
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard was a cloth merchant from Lille, France who learned the calotype process from his druggist, a student of the inventor of the calotype, William Henry Fox Talbot. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather...
Mario Buccellati
Italy
Date of Birth: 1891 — 1965
Founded in 1919 when Mario Buccellati took over Milan's Beltrami & Beltrami, Buccellati is known for its richly textured pieces that are influenced by Renaissance motifs and nature. He was the first famous for the technique of texture-engraving where pieces look like silk, damask, tulle, lace,...
William Chawner
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1797 — 1834
Flatware-making is one of the sub-specialties of silversmithing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the vast majority of spoons and forks were made by specialist 'spoon makers' (knives were made by an entirely different tradesman called a cutler). The Chawner family was one of England's dominant...
Charles Christofle
France
Date of Birth: 1805 — 1863
Charles Christofle founded the company that bears his name in 1830. Originally a jeweler, he bought the patents silver plating and electrolytic gilding of gold in 1842. As a goldsmith, he transformed ceremonial items and everyday objects: from jewelry to cutlery, gold smithery to sculptures, and...
Antoine Claudet
France
Date of Birth: 1797 — 1867
Antoine Claudet was a French businessman who moved to London to open a glass warehouse. The daguerreotype process quickly attracted his interest and he returned to Paris to be taught its fundamentals by the creator himself, Louis-Jacques Daguerre.
Returning to England with an operating license,...
Henry Comstock
Canada
Date of Birth: 1820 — 1870
Henry Tompkins (or Thomas) Paige Comstock (1820–1870) was an Canadian miner after whom the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada was named. The Comstock Lode was the richest silver mine in American history.
Referred to by history books variously as a "sanctimonious gaffer", an "illiterate...
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
France
Date of Birth: 1787 — 1851
Louis Daguerre, was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. The first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce but it was of poor quality and required eight hours exposure time. Niépce...
Marcus Daly
United States
Date of Birth: 1841 — 1900
Marcus Daly (December 5, 1841 – November 12, 1900) was an Irish-born American businessman known as one of the three "Copper Kings" of Butte, Montana, United States. Prior to his copper career, Daly gained experience in the silver mines of the Comstock mines under the direction of John William...
Henry Lawrence Vincent Day
United States
Date of Birth: 1902 — 1985
Hank Day (1902-1985) was born in in Spokane, Washington, to Helen Dwyer and Harry Lawrence Day, and grew up in Burke, Idaho, site of the great Hercules mine. In 1905, the family moved to Wallace, Idaho where he remained with the exceptions of when he attended the University of California where,...
Paul de Lamerie
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1688 — 1751
One of the leading English silversmiths in the first half of the 1700s, Paul de Lamerie was renowned for his technical proficiency and innovative designs using bold organic forms. De Lamerie's parents, French Huguenots, probably left France for religious reasons in the 1680s, emigrating to the...