Hi, please could you look at these marks on old fork, is this of any value cleared out old parent cupboards. Many thanks Kas.
1 Like
Deykin & Harrison (William R. Deykin and Walter A. Harrison).
1 Like
This is a silver plated pickle fork with mother-of-pearl handle. It is part of a “Venetian Silver” pattern manufactured by Deykins, hence the man standing in a gondola punting.
The five discernible marks are a fleur de lys, the gondola, an italised D an ampersand and something that is probably an S for Sons but later could have been an H for Harrison.
There are a lot of these pickle forks dating late Victorian to Edwardian in ETSY and they range in price from $75 with a sterling silver collar to about $25 if plain plate which I think this probably is.
I note an earlier discussion in this forum about a boat man which while accurate, does not explain the high prow and pole.
The other siver forum describes this mark as “the most confusing ever” mostly because their subscribers thought it might be Canadian. But even the most daring of Esquimalt or Inuit boat men in our Arctic found little use for a pole in an ocean deep enough to house most of the Chinese and Russian submarine navy.
Kudoes to Bart for tracing the boat mark back into Forum history.
Again, and I’m sorry to keep harping on about this, but we lack a simple boolean Index search capability on this forum so our faithful clients can find previous mention of boats with ease.
Failure to do it will mean AI will put us out of business.
CRWW
2 Likes
1 Like
The Discourse software that powers this forum doesn’t have a boolean search capability. Numerous users have requested it over the last decade, but the developers have never taken them up on it.
Replacing the forum software with something from another vendor would be a fairly substantial and expensive undertaking.
3 Likes
Thanks for the courtesy of your swift response to the 'plaint.
As you will be aware what might have been true a few short years ago no longer remains so.
Today you either lead the pack or become its next meal.
CRWW
1 Like
I had to do some quick experimenting and then some online hunting about the software. Transitioning to a new platform has always been laborious - accounts have to be reconstituted somehow, content has to be exported from one and imported to the other (and that’s often very messy), and so on.
Having said that, I develop web software as a retirement hobby, and it’s becoming very clear that AI is on the brink of being able to replace most of what I do. A few months ago I fed it a problem that I knew I could solve, but only at the expense of a lot of coding time, and I was blown away by the response from ChatGPT. It didn’t just modify the example code that I was trying to adapt. It completely rewrote it, and in exactly the fashion I would have. The result was more modular and much more amenable to future tweaking. What would have taken me a couple of hours was plunked into my lap in a few seconds.
At least for now, AI doesn’t seem to possess much creativity - it doesn’t come up with totally new ideas. Then again, that’s gradually drifting away from me, as well. But it is certainly adept at some types of technical chores. Replacing Discourse with, say, phpBB (which does offer boolean searches) might be a doddle.
1 Like
My own experiments are similar and, while I lack your in depth knowledge of how computers work, I know how to trigger useful answers out of them and this, for the moment, remains my trump card.
At the risk of sounding egotistical the fact that I know slightly more about silver than the average person has enabled me to keep ahead in that market and the fact that I have always used computers – I believe I was the first person in the world to list real estate for sale on the Web back in 1981 before it was the web— enables me to avoid some of the hazards attendant upon that
Last week I came across a rather sweet little caddy spoon with a scallop shell bowl, a Celtic point, remains of lost mercury gold on the bowl and a handle devoid of initials. The only mark on it was JO in italics.
I decided I would let Google Chat GPT tell me what I suspected. First it told me I had probably misread the evidence. I refuted that and it backed off fast and came up with an Edinburgh maker. I queried the lack of town assay marks and it backed off again and came up with James Orr of Grenock. It then wanted chapter and verse on condition and asked me to describe verbally the photo evidence already in front of it.
At this point it came up with a valuation based on similar product sold at Scottish auctions, stopped treating me like the village idiot and told me it was worth $C1,200.00. It even wanted to tell me who I should get to sell it, which, since it wasn’t me, I presumed meant it was looking for commission. I thanked it for its service and shut down.
Frankly the only difference between that computer search and one I could have put to the panel of talented experts here, is we might have taken less of the VI approach to the buyer and wouldn’t have been quite so in your face about getting in on the action.
All this little exercise tells me is unless this Forum rings up the changes, we are going to become irrelevant. We may already be.
CRWW
1 Like
I think your amusing exegesis suggests the opposite. You had to course correct the good ship Chatbot at every rocky shoal. Humans tend to defy logic and all accumulated evidence of behaviour. The village has a surfeit of idiots.
1 Like
Yes. Your “prisoner in charge of the guillotine trundle cart” take doesn’t really factor in the ability of AI Bots to learn from our efforts to stay ahead of it.
I have a single engine pilot’s licence. Means I can fly a Cessna 172 or equivalent, and if anybody wants I can take a couple of passengers. And I get to fly that machine. Hands and feet on the controls much the way I first learned to fly decades ago. My professional pilot friends, who fly machines which could transport twenty of the single engines I get to play with, hardly touch the controls except on take off and landing. They are more flight administrators than flyers, monitoring and correcting deviations in computers that actually fly the machines we all sit in the back of.
Every now and then I get to look inside the cockpits, I used to be able to hitch rides but that’s illegal now, Their job is dead boring. That’s where this trundle cart is taking us.
Already has when you get comments like. " Thanks B…, that is what Google just told me" which appears in a post subsequent to this.
And unfortunately it’s not just us on this site relying upon the mechanical regurgitation of data, it’s auctioneers and Ebay sellers. Which leads to massive inadvertent fraud which is eventually going to do to the silver sales business, which is relatively well-documented by hallmarks, what has been done to the far more subjective furniture and fine art business.
But as always thank you for reading my rant, Paul and from your lips to God’s ears. I really hope you are right.
CRWW
2 Likes