silvering

silvering, process of making mirrors by coating glass with silver, discovered by the German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1835. In the process silver–ammonia compounds are reduced chemically to metallic silver, which is deposited on a suitably shaped glass surface. Modern processes may utilize silver solutions and reducer solutions—consisting of invert sugar, Rochelle salt, or formaldehyde—that meet in a spray above clean glass traveling on a conveyor; as the spray falls on the glass surface, metallic silver is deposited.

Silvering of partial reflectors, for optical and physics research applications, must be done by a process slow enough so that the amount of reflectivity can be controlled. Partial reflectors transmit and reflect only portions of the incident light. Special mirrors for such instruments as reflecting telescopes are usually silvered by evaporation of silver onto a surface from an electrically heated filament in high vacuum.