Electroplating is a technique by which craftsmen use an electrical current to "coat" and object with an extremely thin layer of metal to improve its resistance to corrosion, wear and tear or even just to make it pretty. For a long time, as far as we knew, it was thought that electroplating was invented in the 1800s by the Italians, but artefacts have since been unearthed that could push the discovery of electroplating back a good couple of millennia. It would also seem, rather humiliatingly, that olde worlde craftsmen were actually way better at protecting, plating and gilding objects than we are today. Experts continue to bicker about whether they used electroplating, some kind of mercury-based glue or even a technology unknown to us, but everyone is still trying to figure out how exactly they got to be so damn good at it. We don't know for sure how far back the technology extends, but experts suspect that even the ancient Babylonians were in on the act, which would date it further back than the Baghdad Batteries by at least a thousand years. King Tut himself was buried with a belt buckle that appears to have been electroplated, and some archaeologists suspect that people may have even used it as a way of forging coins. In fact, many of the "gold" coins on display in museums around the world could well be electroplated counterfeits (much to the horror of the aforementioned archaeologists).
