The practice of tinning ironware to protect it against rust is an ancient one. According to Pliny the Elder tinning was invented by the Gallic Bituriges tribe (based near modern Bourges), who boiled copper objects in a tin solution in order to make them look as if they were made from silver. The first detailed account of the process appears in Zosimus of Panopolis, Book 6.62, part of a work on alchemy written in Roman Egypt around 300 AD. Aside from an attestation in 14th century England, the process is not attested again in Europe until the description in Lazarus Erckers Das Kleine Probierbuch' (1556)
The manufacture of tinplate was long a monopoly of Bohemia, but in about the year 1620 the industry spread to Saxony. Tinplate was apparently produced in the 1620s at a mill of (or under the patronage of) the Earl of Southampton, but it is not clear how long this continued.
Andrew Yarranton, an English engineer and agriculturist, and Ambrose Crowley (a Stourbridge blacksmith and father of the more famous Sir Ambrose Crowley III) were commissioned to go to Saxony and if possible discover the methods employed. They visited Dresden in 1667 and found out how it was made. In doing so, they were sponsored by various local ironmasters and people connected with the project to make the River Stour navigable. In Saxony, the plates were forged, but when they conducted experiments on their return to England, they tried rolling the iron. This led to two of the sponsors, the ironmasters Philip Foley and Joshua Newborough, erecting a new mill, Wolverley Lower Mill (or forge), in 1670. This contained three shops: one being a slitting mill, which would serve as a rolling mill, the others being forges. In 1678 one of these was making frying pans and the other drawing out blooms made in finery forges elsewhere. It is likely that the intention was to roll the plates and then finish them under a hammer, but the plan was frustrated by one William Chamberlaine renewing a patent granted to him and Dud Dudley in 1662. Yarranton described the patent as "trumped up".
The slitter at Wolverley was Thomas Cooke. Another Thomas Cooke, perhaps his son, moved to Pontypool and worked there for John Hanbury (1664–1734). According to Edward Lhuyd, by 1697, John Hanbury had a rolling mill at Pontypool for making "Pontypoole Plates" machine. This has been claimed as a tinplate works, but it was almost certainly only producing (untinned) blackplate. However, this method of rolling iron plates by means of cylinders, enabled more uniform black plates to be produced than was possible with the old plan of hammering, and in consequence the English tinplate became recognised as superior to the German.
Tinplate first begins to appear in the Gloucester Port Books (which record trade passing through Gloucester, mostly from ports in the Bristol Channel) in 1725. The tinplate was shipped from Newport, Monmouthshire. This immediately follows the first appearance (in French) of Réaumurs Principes de lart de fer-blanc, and prior to a report of it being published in England.
Further mills followed a few years later, initially in many ironmaking regions in England and Wales, but later mainly in south Wales. In 1805, 80,000 boxes were made and 50,000 exported. The industry continued to spread steadily in England and especially Wales, and after 1834 its expansion was rapid, Great Britain becoming the chief source of the world's supply. In that year her total production was 180,000 boxes of 108 lb each (around 50 kg, in America a box is 100 lb), in 1848 it was 420,000 boxes, in 1860 it reached 1,700,000 boxes. But subsequently the advance was rapid, and the production reached about 2,236,000 lb in 1891. One of the greatest markets was the United States of America, but that market was cut off in 1891, when the McKinley tariff was enacted there. This caused a great retrenchment in the British industry and the emigration to America of many of those who could no longer be employed in the surviving tinplate works.
In 1891, the United States made 11,000 tons of tinplate and imported 325,100 tons, but in 1899, it made 360,900 tons, importing only 63,500 tons (mostly for re-export). British exports were further hindered by the Dingley tariff, which removed the advantage of Welsh plate on America's Pacific coast, had by 1900 increased to more than 849,000,000 lb, of which over 141,000,000 lb were terne-plates. The total imports in that year were only 135,264,881 lb. In later years, again, there was a decline in the American production, and in 1907 only 20% of the American tinplate mills were at work, while the British production reached 14 million boxes.
Despite this blow, the industry continued, but on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, there were still 518 mills in operation in 1937, including 224 belonging to Richard Thomas & Co. However the traditional pack mill had been overtaken by the improved strip mill, of which the first in Great Britain was built by Richard Thomas & Co. in the late 1930s. Strip mills rendered the old pack mills obsolete and the last of them closed in about the 1960s.