Serving the Arts Industry
Jewelry manufacturers, concerned with the "karat integrity"
of the products they made, needed a way to guarantee their
alloys contained the legally-specified percentage of gold
or silver without having to employ the costly procedure
of adding excess precious metals to them. Handy & Harman
solved this problem by fabricating silver and gold alloys
in centralized plants using advanced equipment and processes
to guarantee the exact precious metal content of our alloys.
In the early 1900s, reclaiming gold and silver from manufacturing
scrap was inefficient because of limited technology. At that
time, jewelers and silversmiths would refine their own scrap, and
because of unsophisticated, small-scale equipment and procedures considerable
amounts of gold and silver would be lost. By using improved
processes, we were able to refine a manufacturer's scrap more efficiently
than they could themselves, and by developing techniques
for blending, sampling and assaying a scrap lot, we were able to accurately
determine the price to be paid to the manufacturer.
Leadership in the 20th Century
Handy & Harman kept pace as the market for precious metals
grew in the first half of the 20th century establishing new plants and
offices, investing in research and development, building national sales
and distribution and educating industry further in precious metal uses
and the handling of scrap.
Along the way a new product line of brazing alloys – sometimes
referred to as "silver solders" – and fluxes for joining
metals were developed. As early as 1905 we began supplying small
quantities of these "solders" to the arts industry, and in
response to increasing demand Handy & Harman developed standardized
alloys – in-strip,
rod and wire form – for general industry metal-joining applications.
During World War II, these new alloys proved invaluable in the mass production
of planes, ships, tanks, guns and ammunition. In the post-war
years Handy & Harman
continued development for precious metal fabrication, including
selective cladding, the alloying of electrical contact materials,
the rolling of ultra-thin strip and sheet, and the production
of complex products that combined cladding, plating and stamping.
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