In 1872, Otto Leonard Wiskemann - a descendant of a German family with a long history in silversmithing - started a workshop in the Rue des Longs Chariots in Brussels. In the years before he had worked as an apprentice in Paris, where he learned the necessary tricks of the trade. He had also witnessed the introduction of electroplating to continental Europe by Charles Christofle, who had bought the pattents from England. Thanks to this experience and knowledge, Otto was able to start a company in the 1870s that would later become the best-known silversmith in Belgium and a figurehead of quality. The company experienced its heyday between the two World Wars, and eventually went under in the 1970s; the close of a century of history in Belgian silversmithing.