1851 Great Exhibition: Official Catalogue: Class X.: John Baker Edwards
438. EDWARDS, JOHN BAKER, Liverpool — Producer and Manufacturer.
Series of glass retorts, beakers, evaporating basins, and other glass and porcelain vessels for chemical purposes, electro-coppered. Vessels thus coated accelerate solution and distillation, and require a minimum of heat to conduct these processes, while the copper conducting the heat equably over the surface of the glass, preserves it from fracture and unequal expansion, and at the same time protects it from external casualties.
[The covering of glass and porcelain vessels with copper was first exhibited at the French Exposition in 1844. These vessels excited great curiosity, and occasioned much perplexing speculation as to the mode of their production. The coating of metal was applied in so smooth, perfect, and uniform a manner, as to render it evident that none of the ordinary methods of metallurgy had been adopted in their manufacture. These vessels were coated by electrotype process, and similar apparatus is now made for chemical purposes in England. The surface of the glass or porcelain is first varnished, then brushed over with bronze-powder, in order to form a conducting surface on which to deposit the copper, and the vessel is then placed in the decomposition-cell, in connection with a battery. In a few days the whole external surface is covered with bright metallic copper.—R. E.]