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I am not sure that a tinsmith and a whitesmith are quite the same thing. If they are these articles should be merged.
It is not appropriate to have a description of tinplate making here, when there is a separate article on that subject.
The English ban on making tinplate is oversimplified. In 1750, a ban was imposed on building new plating forges and rolling mills; any existing ones remained legal. This ban of course ended with the American Revolution, and was thus quite shortlived. Peterkingiron00:42, 25 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I note the revert on the addition "or whitesmith". My first criticism above has not been resolved.
I have moveed the sentence on the Iron Act into the "raw material" section, and made an additoon to this - but I am not sure that this material belongs here rather than in tinplate. I regret that I am also guilty of inserting material that is technically WP:OR. It is in fact well-sourced, but in archival sources, not published ones. I know the use of archival sources in WP is discouraged - but what else can one use when they are unpublished? Peterkingiron18:37, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I do not wish to be dogmatic on this, and am not sure that I have the distinctions between Whitesmith, tinsmith and tinplateworker clear in my own mind, let along getting it into WP. It is quite possible that before tinplate was available, the meanings were different. I note your reference is to a work 9n the nature of a thesaurus; in my experience, definitions in such works lack precision. Peterkingiron (talk) 13:52, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I understand where you are coming from. I'm definitely no expert in this realm. In my mind they seem very similar, but it's hard to find any reliable sources backing it up (at least on the web; I don't have any paper sources to work with). You definitely have a good point that they could have meant two different things during differing time periods, and now are interchangeable. Until someone can come along and really figure this out I suppose we should leave them as separate articles. Wizard191 (talk) 14:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It seems pretty clear from this article that a "tinsmith" is someone who works with "tinned iron" or tinplate. A pewtersmith is someone who works with pewter, a low melt alloy primarily used in casting utensils. "Whitesmith" is a totally new term to me, but it seems from it's use in other articles, that it is someone who works with the PRODUCTION of tinplate. "White metal" is the family of metals of which pewter is the most common, but is primarily used to discribe the soft metal bearing used in the early industrial period. This is quite a confused article in terms of terminology. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmackaerospace (talk • contribs) 10:35, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This is correct. I was with a Whitesmith yesterday who remarked that the Wikipedia article is incorrect. He also noted that his college has an absolute ban on quoting anything from Wikipedia due to it's political bias and widespread inaccuracy. He showed me a sample of tinplate that was made in the original method, and it's distinctive markings. As a whitesmith he does no work with metals containing lead (pewter).
