Early in the Revolution, for example, General George Washington ordered a set of 12 silver “camp cups” from the Philadelphia Silversmith Edmond Milne. He supplied Milne with “16 silv^r Doll^s” to make the cups out of. Possibly these were Portuguese or Brazilian crusadoes or “cross dollars.” As it turned out, there were 1¾ ounces more silver in the 16 dollars than Milne needed for the 12 cups. He retained the excess for his own use and credited its value against his charge for workmanship. Coins went directly into the smith’s “black lead” or graphite crucible. Old plate had to be broken up first into pieces of suitable size. Then the crucible was set down into—not on—the charcoal fire in the forge. Charcoal on top of the melting silver kept it from absorbing too much oxygen. Pure silver is a highly ductile and malleable metal with the relatively low melting point of 1761 degrees Fahrenheit. Sterling silver melts at an even lower temperature, so only 15 or 20 minutes in the forge, with constant use of the bellows, would be enough to melt the crucible’s charge. Most impurities in the metal would be sopped up by the porous graphite of the crucible itself. The molten metal was then poured out into a two-piece cast iron ingot mold or into an open mold called a “skillet.” In either case, the cooling metal released any oxygen it might have absorbed in the form of spitting bubbles that left the surface of the ingot pitted with tiny holes. If the piece of work to be made was a small ornament, it would be cast directly in a sand mold formed by the smith around a pattern of his own making. The acorn-like finials atop teapots or on the covers of tankards were normally made by casting, often a dozen at a time. Perhaps, however, some customer ordered a simple, straight-sided silver cup, too large to be cast. Our smith could have made it by any one of three methods and the result would be the same in size, shape, weight, and appearance. Generally only another silversmith could hope to tell which was made by which process: forging, raising, or seaming. To _forge_ such a cup the silversmith would have taken a billet of silver perhaps 3/16 inches thick and from it cut a disk of the same diameter as the lip of the finished cup. Then by careful and repeated hammer blows, using shaped anvils of the proper size and curvature, he would pound the metal into the form he required. To _raise_ a cup, the smith would start with silver in the form of a flat sheet as thick (or thin) as he wanted the cup to be. He would have made the sheet himself, of course, by beating an ingot to the required thinness. From the sheet he would cut a disk whose diameter equalled the average diameter plus the average height of the finished cup. By carefully hammering the silver just beyond the edge of the anvil, he would force the metal around the outer part of the disk to rise and “shrink” until the cup was shaped.