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History of Chain Making
(NOTE: The content presented below is an excerpt from an original paper entitled "Platinum Chain Making" by Tino Volpe, Tiffany & Co., presented at the 2004 PGI Symp PGI Symposium and reprinted in PGI Technical Volume 11N4. For the full content, please see http://www.pgi-platinum-tech.com/pdf/V11N4.pdf
In preparing for this paper, I began my research with the understanding that finding information on chain making, especially historical information, would be a fairly simple task. However, after looking through old copies of jewelry history books, surfing the internet, and interviewing people with a long history in the industry, I arrived at the conclusion that the history of chain making is either a well kept secret or just not of much interest to anyone.
Precious metal chain for jewelry has been around for a long time. Basically when man first began working extensively with gold back in Neolithic times he found that certain metals, most notably pure gold, were extremely ductile and could be hammered and stretched to a great degree. With the invention of wire, man could now take something rigid like metal and turn it into something flexible like chain.
Chain making has always been, up until the middle of the 18th century, a labor-intensive time consuming hand operation. It was a well-versed art and most books on jewelry will demonstrate basic techniques on making chain by hand.
Before automated wire drawing machines, the craftsman had to hammer down and pull metal through succeeding smaller dies to form thin wire. Once the wire was pulled down to the needed diameter, it was wound around a mandrel forming loops. Then, the craftsman would make a cut through the looped wire down the length of the mandrel forming individual offset loops. The craftsman would then interlock the loops, bend each link closed, and then solder each link. Tedious indeed, if you considered making an 11-32 chain (.011" wire at 32 links per inch) by hand, it would contain 512 links for a 16-inch chain! Although the Persians and Romans were making chain, the best and most extensive use of forming wire into interlocking loops was during medieval times when armor was made by forming loops of wire and sewing it to an attached garment. If all the loops were interlocked together it was called chain amour. In fact chain mail (or chain maille) is a term that came from this time period referring to flat chain. (1)
There are many, many different kinds of chain. All can be made by hand. Some can only be made by hand.
Some would be foolish to make by hand.
Chain making was mostly a hand operation all the way up until the middle of the 17th century. At this time, we saw the
invention of the chain machine. It is very difficult to determine where the chain machine was invented, and talking to
different people will get you different versions of history. There is an unauthored article from World Gold Council
brochure that claims  Examples of chain
As world wars one and two ravaged Europe, many of
the craftsman immigrated to America, taking up residence in the Providence area of Rhode Island, which was the center of the American jewelry industry at the time. They brought their craft with them and chain manufacturing took hold here. After the wars and into the 60's, the Italians grabbed the technology and soon became the masters of chain making machines and remain so to this day.
There have been few technological advances to the
basic chain machine over the centuries. The method of powering them has kept up with the times, with all of today's machines powered by their own electric
motors. Tooling, which is the heart of the machine that forms the various types of chain, has fallen under technological advances also, with today's tools made from very hard carbide steels, which now allows the
machines to handle platinum chain making.
Over the years, machines have evolved in their ability
to make an incredible number of different type chains. The machines have fallen into several basic types, which make most of the chains.
Briefly there are two major types of chain machines,
cable machines and curb chain machines.
Cable machines feed wire off a spool into a set of
straightening rollers. It then goes through a guide and
gripper, which feeds it against a stop, which determines the length of the wire and thus the size of the link. Unless this is the first link, the wire is also fed through the previously made link. A forming tool then pushes down on the wire forming it into a U. Just before this forming happens, a cutter cuts the wire from the feedstock. After the U forms, a bottom set of jaw type tools holding the wire closes and a top-forming tool comes down to complete the shape and close the link. The link is then rotated 90 degrees and the process starts all over again.
A curb machine takes a slightly different method by
feeding the wire into a helix type tool which forms it
into a spiral. As the helix turns, the spiral wire is fed
through the previous loop. The loop is closed as it is
grabbed and cut off the spiral. The link is then rotated
as the next loop of wire is fed through.
There are also machines, which make chain from flat
stock, sometimes called snake chain machines. Ball
chain machines make ball chain from both wire and
flat stock with the flat stock being formed into a ball
around the wire. There are Figaro chain machines,
which have two heads for making two size links.
There are other types of machines making many other types of chains, some of which can be seen in the illustration. For many,
many years most machines made chain from either non precious metal such as brass or copper or precious metals such as sterling silver
and the various karat golds. Platinum chain came into the marketplace much later due to the fact that platinum itself was a relative
latecomer to the high production jewelry industry. Being difficult to work with and destructive to tooling, very little platinum chain
was made until recently. The gap for a white metal chain was filled in with white gold (which may have been rhodium plated) or silver.
Acknowledgements
- http://www.timeless-links.com
- Aurum Magazine Issue 34, 1988
- World Gold Council – undated
- Wolters, Jochem, Gold Chains and Mesh IV Aurum
Magazine Issue 36 1988
- Volpe & Lanam, Utilization of Lasers in the Joining
of Gold and Platinum Jewelry. Santa Fe
Symposium, 1998
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