| Sheffield plate was discovered in 1742 by Thomas Boulsover, who was able to fuse sheets of sterling silver onto copper ingots. |
| A bit farther on, glowing one-ton ingots of steel thunder down rollers to be pressed into thin sheets. |
| Acquiring gold and silver was vital for coinage and, in the late Empire, for official payments in plate and ingots. |
| The method was similar, but now the copper ingot was sandwiched between two ingots of silver. |
| In the iron industry, hard manual labour was still crucial for charging furnaces or dragging ingots around the forge. |
| For these reasons acid steel is considered better than basic for certain purposes, such as large forging ingots and ball bearing steel. |
