The history of electroplating

A. Hi Prabhakara. Anything is possible, so it's possible that electroplating was done long ago in Bagdad and/or elsewhere. But what can sometimes happen that we do not sufficiently guard against, especially today in the age of Facebook memes and Photoshop, is people starting with a wild speculation, then sketching or talking about what it could possibly look like if their wild speculation were true, then the next person presenting those sketches and models out of context ... and before you know it you have thousands of people saying they've seen sketches or photos of a battery that was discovered in Bagdad :-)

According to what I saw on Discovery Channel, a piece of copper was found somewhere near a piece of iron somewhere near some pottery shards, so someone made a wild speculation and it grew from there. No earthen pot was discovered, so it did not contain anything let along an iron rod and a copper plate.

Although it's possible, I personally don't think it ever existed not only because there seems to be no evidence of it, but because if we really did discover how to do electrolysis, with it's easy generation of easily captured hydrogen and oxygen gasses we might have had lighter-than-air balloons and flight. In any case the discovery of hydrogen & oxygen generation with the strange properties of the two gasses would have been a thousand times more interesting than electroplating.

That's my wild speculation :-)

Luck & Regards,

A. Hi Linda. The closest thing I can think of to one-stop shopping for you is a VHS video called "History of Electroplating with Al Weisberg" available from www.nasf.org.

But there are dozens of journal articles from numerous countries and in several different languages including "History of Electroplating & Electroforming in Russia", "Nickel Plating - Brief History", "Early History of Gold Electroplating", "The Origins & History of Gold Plating", "History & Introduction to Brush Plating", "History of Chromium Plating", "A History of Zinc Plating", etc.

You probably need to do a published lit search (not a website search) incorporating the terms 'history' and 'electroplating'.

A. For reasons too complex to explain here I cannot get to my reference collection. I do remember that in 1984 the AESF ran a history of the association and of plating in their 75th anniversary edition of Plating & Surface Finishing. A student of industry history, if you can locate him, would be Al Weisberg, retired from Technic, Inc. but probably still reachable through them. He set up a little museum of plating history, collects antique plating photos and apparatus and has, in the past made presentations to groups regarding the history of plating.

The web address for AESF (American Electroplaters and Surface Finishers Society) is nasf.org

Hope this helps.

A. In the name of god I'm a student of chemistry. I didn't study about history of electroplating, but last year I read a Persian magazine that wrote that Persian in about 2000 years ago done electroplating on some coins. I am sorry that I forget magazine's name.

 Thank you, Mr. Ojaghi. I think that is very possibly true, but I haven't myself seen evidence that it is definitely true.

 I think it's certainly possible that the early Chinese did some electroplating, John. But things as simple as the wheel, the domestication of farm animals, and phonetic writing didn't exist in the Americas until the Europeans arrived, despite tens of thousands of years of civilization -- so I don't see any reason to say that the Chinese or any other group "must have known about electroplating".

Just because something is shiny doesn't mean it's actually chromium plated--maybe they are silver, nickel, or zinc? There is another technology not involving electricity that was used in early cultures, i.e., surface enrichment with acids. There, a typical gold and copper alloy was cast, then acid was used to dissolve the copper and thereby gold-enrich the surface. I heard that the Aztecs did a lot of that.

A. I caught the History Channel show about the Baghdad Battery, and here's the thing: it's flight-of-fancy speculation, not fact. While we have no good reason to dismiss the possibility that the Persians could have invented a battery; all we really have are a couple of pottery shards, and a piece of iron and a piece of copper discovered in the same general area.

Some archeologists then advanced a theory that the iron and copper could have been put into a pottery jar, and this filled with vinegar to make a battery. They then developed artist's conceptions of what they conjectured ... but we must not fool ourselves into thinking that these artists' conception of what might have been possible is what was actually found ... it was only a little blob of copper somewhere in the area of a blob of iron somewhere in the area of pottery shards :-)
Other archeologists feel it was just a few ritual items and that there is no evidence whatsoever of the use of batteries, and they note that pottery shards are hardly an astounding thing to find in a dig :-)

Anything is possible, John, but just repeating assertions doesn't make them more true. You said the first time that they were chrome plated, and I replied that everything that is shiny isn't chrome plated. Is there any metallurgical analysis or metallography demonstrating either that they contain chromium or that they are electroplated?

A. The Baghdad Battery is speculation, Rick, not a known fact. Nor have any electroplated coins been found from that era as far as I have heard; they are speculation as well. As a real research project, you might go to a large library and investigate everything you can about this and write a paper on whether you think the battery was real or not. But please see our FAQ, "Electroplating: How it Works", for instruction on electroplating of coins for a school science project. Good luck!

A. Hi, Harold. As previously noted repeatedly, the "Baghdad Battery" is not an actual device, it is a theory based on archeologists having found a chunk of copper and a chunk of iron somewhere near some pottery shards (there is nothing more common in archeology than pottery shards). I'd like to believe it existed, and have no strong reason to say it couldn't have, but the evidence so far is sketchier than sketchy, and my personal guess is that it didn't exist.

The primary reason for my guess that it didn't exist is that it is difficult to conduct electroplating experiments like this without generating very obvious quantities of hydrogen gas at the cathode. If the ancients did this, and saw this generation of gas, and had any curiosity at all about what they were doing (which they surely did), it sounds highly unlikely that they would have failed to discover the "lighter than air" hydrogen gas that they were producing. Mankind's hunger to fly is primal, far more urgent & perennial than the desire to electroplate, and we would have had ancient hydrogen balloons, rather than plated coins :-)

So don't weaken your science project by claiming that the battery existed -- use your results as evidence that it could have.

Don't dilute the juice or vinegar because they are already very weak acids. You can consult the galvanic series to determine the maximum theoretical voltage that the combination of iron and copper will generate, and see how close you can come. Good luck!

Regards,

A. Hi Bill. You are correct. Until the mid 1970s virtually all zinc plating was done from cyanide based plating baths, and it was not shiny like today's Bright Acid Zinc is. Acid zinc took the world by storm in the second half of the 1970s; I don't have actual statistics, but based on visits to many zinc plating shops, I believe that the amount of acid zinc plated in the USA probably began to exceed the amount of cyanide zinc plated by the early or mid 1980s.

Regards,

A. Hi Curtis. I am not an historian but I was working for Harshaw Chemical Co. (now Atotech) from 1974 to 1979, which was the period when they introduced and popularized bright acid zinc plating. Before that we had only cyanide zinc plating, and it was indeed rather matte looking.

I think I'm seeing a bit of confusion in your posting about what "yellow zinc" is. All zinc plating is silvery in tone, never gold-ish in tone. When people talk about "yellow zinc", it's just shorthand for zinc plating followed by yellow chromate conversion coating rather than clear or blue or olive or black chromate conversion coating. I have never seen zinc plating which was not chromate conversion coated as a matter of course; and yellow was quite common, as were clear and blue, but I cannot say which color conversion coating was used on British sports cars.

I would, however, urge you to consider spec'ing tin-zinc plating rather than the highly toxic cadmium plating. We should be getting cadmium out of the environment, not putting it on classic cars because it looks authentic even though it isn't :-)

Regards,

A. Hi All
I am a little surprised by this thread.
I have never seen an old British (or probably Continental) car with any zinc plating except possibly on engine parts like throttle linkage.
The very earliest (pre WW2) cars probably used nickel but from the 50s chrome was the invariable finish for hub caps, bumpers (fenders) door fittings etc. The standard texts of the time (The Canning Handbook [on eBay, Amazon, AbeBooks affil links], etc) only show large automated lines full of car parts and always chrome, with a full spec copper/nickel/chrome on quality parts.
Zinc only started to appear probably late 90s,and only as the Zinc/tin alloy although first developed in the 40s. As I recall it was first used as a corrosion resistant finish on brake lines as the finish was not at first acceptable for decorative use.
I have no idea what was used in US but given the universal demand for a shiny finish, I would expect development followed the same course.
Cadmium on any external surface seems extremely unlikely for similar reasons.

 Thanks Geoff. I think these guys are talking about fasteners and underhood components rather than decorative stuff. My only British sports car was a 1969 MGB and although I don't remember what it looked like under the hood, I should, because I spent endless hours there trying to keep it running :-)

When I was with Harshaw in the late 70's we did start applying bright acid zinc, followed by a clearcoat, to bicycle rims as a decorative finish. To my knowledge that was the first attempt to use zinc plating decoratively, and it was probably okay as long as you made sure to never parked those bikes next to ones with chrome plated rims :-)

Regards,