Owen Walker

What is the difference? Is there a difference? Why is the world confused? In the old days when the only way to learn a skill set or profession was to serve an apprenticeship, there was no ambiguity. A silversmith made silverware like teapots, trays, and flatware, knives, spoons etc. A goldsmith made rings, pins, earrings, necklaces and other articles of gold jewelry. A jeweler was the man who put the jewels in watches and clocks. We will not talk about jewelers.

In the old apprenticeship system you would start at about age ten, sweeping the floors and providing a third hand when needed as you learned the terminology of the trade, and the dangers. By age twelve to fourteen you were supplying useful labor doing the repetitive tasks and the routine boring things that are associated with every profession. By age sixteen you would have a good set of skills and your master would start challenging you with new tasks and projects to build your skills and make you an asset to the shop. By age eighteen you would have been set to your journeyman project, which would demonstrate the skills you had learned over the span of your apprenticeship

As a journeyman you were legally and socially able to call yourself a Silversmith, and could set up your own business. You could, as the say, “hang out your shingle.” If you wanted to become a goldsmith you would have to stay with your master a couple of more years. Everything you had learned at this point was about working with silver, gold is, of course, much more expensive than silver and the articles made from it are usually much smaller than those made of silver. There is one great difference in working with gold, and that is the conductance of heat. Silver is the most conductive metal on the planet, it is the metal that we measure all the others against. All goldsmiths in the old days were also silversmiths, and indeed started out as silversmiths. This is no longer true. Working with gold can be much easier than working with silver, but mistakes are much more costly.

Now days you can learn to be a goldsmith by attending a trade school, university, or learning from another goldsmith, without ever learning all the things that a silversmith must know about silver and how it acts. You can go right into the jewelry trade and never know how to work with silver; this is why it is often difficult to get a silver ring sized. This is the reason you see so few people calling themselves silversmiths today. I learned the old way and was a silversmith before I became a goldsmiths.