The Birmingham Assay Office, one of the four assay offices in the United Kingdom, is located in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. The development of a silver industry in 18th century Birmingham was hampered by the legal requirement that items of solid silver be assayed, and the nearest Assay Offices were in Chester and London.Matthew Boulton and Birmingham's other great industrialists joined forces with silversmiths of Sheffield to petition Parliament for the establishment of Assay Offices in their respective cities. In spite of determined opposition by London silversmiths, an Act of Parliament was passed in March 1773, just one month after the original petition was presented to Parliament, to allow Birmingham and Sheffield the right to assay silver. The Birmingham Assay Office opened on 31 August 1773 and initially operated from three rooms in the King's Head Inn on New Street employing only four staff and was only operating on a Tuesday. The first customer on that day was Matthew Boulton.
Assay offices are institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals, in order to protect consumers. Upon successful completion of an assay, (i.e. if the metallurgical content is found to be equal or better than that claimed by the maker and it otherwise conforms to the prevailing law) the assay offices typically stamp a hallmark, punze, or poinçon on the item to certify its metallurgical content. Hallmarking first appeared in France, with the Goldsmiths' Statute of 1260 promulgated under Etienne Boileau, Provost of Paris, for King Louis IX.
US assay offices
Title 15, Chapter 8, Section 291 of the United States Code makes it unlawful to stamp goods in the United States with "United States assay" or any similar stamp which gives the impression that the item has been officially assayed by the United States government.
General overview and function of U.S. assay offices
Assay offices did and do exist in the U.S., but they are affiliated with the government's coinage mints and serve only the government's purposes in that field. They are not involved in hallmarking, as there has never been a hallmarking scheme in the U.S.
The Assay Office is a historic building at 210 Main Street in Boise, Idaho. It is significant for its role in the history of mining in Idaho, and was the first major federal government building in the Idaho Territory. During the first half of the 1860s, Idaho’s gold production was the third highest in the nation. Due to the difficulty of transporting bulky, heavy ores the long distance to the nearest U.S. Mint in San Francisco, there was great demand for an assaying office in Idaho. Gold and other precious metals are not mined in a pure form. In order to place a value on an ore, the precious metal must be separated from the impurities. This is what an assay office does.
The building
In 1869, Congress appropriated $75,000 to build an assay office in Boise, Idaho. The city block site bounded by Main, First, Idaho and Second was donated by Alexander Rossi, a prominent citizen of Boise. Ground was broken in 1870, and the building was completed in 1871. The builder was John R. McBride, Chief Justice of Idaho. The building featured a cupola for ventilation and the interior doors were equipped with iron cages. The first floor of the building held the assayers offices, vaults and safes, assaying and melting rooms (furnaces), laboratory and reagents storage. The second floor was devoted to living quarters for the chief assayer. There was a parlor, pantry, dining room, kitchen and three bedrooms. The basement housed fuel and supply rooms, guards’ quarters and wells.
Birmingham (Live with Orchestra & Choir) is a 2013 live album by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, featuring the Orchestra of the Swan and their Chamber Choir Orchestra Conductor Andrew Powell, who was the man who did the string arrangements on the original studio albums. The album, a Comeuppance production, was released by Absolute via Universal. A DVD version of the performance was also released at the same time.
Background
The album was recorded and filmed live at the Birmingham Symphony Hall, England on 24 November 2012. The band, with the orchestra and chamber choir, made up about 50 performers together, and performed the band's first two albums The Human Menagerie and The Psychomodo in their entirety - with some of the songs entirely new to the stage. The sold-out show was a one off performance of the two albums, and also included Spandau Ballet's Steve Norman on saxophone and percussion. Aside from the two albums performed, the band also played three additional tracks on the night; "Judy Teen" (the band's UK Top 5 hit single from 1974), "Stranger Comes to Town" (the title track from Harley's 2010 album) and "Black or White" (from the 1976 album Timeless Flight. Harley commented "It's been a long time coming - something like 39 years. Now we're here, at last, with an orchestra and a choir and a big rock band, to play those first two albums pretty well the way they appeared on the original vinyl. Maybe some things should never change, in spite of progress. Welcome, my old friends."
Birmingham was founded in 1871, during the post-Civil WarReconstruction period, through the merger of three pre-existing farm towns, notably, former Elyton. It grew from there, annexing many more of its smaller neighbors, into an industrial and railroad transportation center with a focus on mining, the iron and steel industry, and railroading. Birmingham was named for Birmingham, England, UK; one of that nation's major industrial cities. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry. In one writer's view, the city was planned as a place where cheap, non-unionized, and African-American labor from rural Alabama could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast.
) Birmingham Assay OfficeLaunch New Website ... The website launch is a celebration of the future of the Birmingham Assay Office, signifying a fresh new chapter where technology meets tradition. View Birmingham Assay Office Source.
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES ... ALBERT GEA/REUTERS. Sponsored ... OWEN HUMPHREYS/PA WIRE ... Bradley drove down to Birmingham from York on Wednesday morning and was the first in the queue to receive the commemorative hallmark at the Birmingham Assay Office ... .
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