This serving bowl is a great piece of history both with regard to silverplate and shipping.
The originators of silver-plating were George and Henry Elkington who began researching how to do it in the early 1800s. They had patented and seen their process of electro-plating brought to perfection by 1840
Elkington & Co. went on the become the premier silverplating company in the world. You can read more about Elkington here and here. One of the cool things about Elkington is they developed a unique system of marks which allowed accurate dating of all their stuff. Here is a great site that has done a lot of work documenting all the marks. You can see that the bowl I have has a mark from 1900. As Elkington grew they began making dishes for the cruise lines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the White Star Line of Titanic fame. They also made stuff for Norddeutscher-Lloyd or North German Lloyd line. This line had a number of ships including the Bremen, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. You can see a lot of memorabilia for sale here.
This bowl may well have served beans to well healed passengers crossing the Atlantic 100 years ago.
This bowl may well have served beans to well healed passengers crossing the Atlantic 100 years ago.
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