Martelé is a limited hand-wrought production line of silver. Production The work, a departure from machine-made commercial cutlery and hollowware, was named Martelé, from the French verb marteler, "to hammer". The line was made from 1896 through the 1930s by the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island under the direction of Gorham's chief executive, Edward Holbrook, and his chief designer, William Christmas Codman who was brought over from England in 1891. According to Charles Carpenter (Gorham Silver) the metal used in Martelé was softer and purer than the sterling standard (950/1000 parts of silver, where sterling is 925/1000) in order to make the silver more malleable and easier to work by hand. Pristo (Martelé: Gorham's Nouveau Art Silver) indicates that Martelé was initially produced in sterling, but that the higher standard was likely used to meet the French requirement of .950 for the Paris exhibition (silver imported to France would need to be the .950 fineness). The purity was raised again during 1905 to .9584, likely to match the Britannia standard so the silver would be of the highest grade and could not be considered "inferior," especially in light of the awards won. For early items, each object began as a flat piece of silver, raised with hammering to the desired shape by the maker before being passed on to the chaser (the craftsman that added decoration). The finished pieces will show the hammer marks because they were not planished or buffed, another reason they were called Martelé. Although uncommon, some of the later items, such as plates, may have started as spun but were then hammered (Pristo, page 42). A Martelé dressing table took nine hundred hours to make and nearly fourteen hundred hours to chase, all in the context of a sixty-hour week. A coffeepot was raised in about seventy hours and chased in about seventy more, while a labor-intensive peppershaker could not be produced in less than about twenty-five hours, with another twenty hours for chasing. Only 4,800 pieces were produced (other accounts put the number at 7,000 to 8,000) with Pristo indicating about 8200. Web sources indicate only 1500-1700 are still extant (Pristo indicating a suggestion not substantiated by auction records). When the price of silver went up in the 1980s, much Martelé silver was melted down (also not substantiated - the quality of Martelé was superior to items being melted, so few pieces were