The Elkington works stood opposite the Birmingham Assay Office, the institution that hallmarked precious metal in the Midlands. The original factory was built in 1838 and grew along the banks of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, with workshops bridging the now-filled Whitmore's Arm. Inside, the work was both delicate and dangerous. Plating baths used solutions of silver cyanide and potassium cyanide, chemicals that killed quickly if mishandled. By the early 1850s the factory ran a steam-powered generator with sixty-four permanent magnets arranged in a circle around a rotating wrought-iron armature. This was the Woolrich Electrical Generator, built in 1844, and it was the earliest electrical generator put to industrial use anywhere in the world. The current it produced peeled silver from a sacrificial anode and laid it, atom by atom, onto teapots, candlesticks, and trophies waiting in the bath.

One of Elkington's employees, a Birmingham metallurgist named Alexander Parkes, started experimenting with cellulose nitrate dissolved in alcohol and camphor. In 1856 he patented a substance he called Parkesine, the first man-made plastic. He exhibited it at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, where it won a bronze medal for moulded combs, knife handles, and decorative knick-knacks made of a material no one had ever seen before. Parkes' company eventually failed because Parkesine cracked and shrank as it dried, but his idea did not. American inventor John Wesley Hyatt refined the formula in 1869 and patented celluloid, which became billiard balls, photographic film, and shirt collars. Two of the blue plaques on the Newhall Street facade record the building's parallel inventors. One reads George Elkington, electroplating. The other reads Alexander Parkes, plastics.

The Elkington works was largely demolished in the mid-1960s, but the part that remained on Newhall Street became Birmingham's Museum of Science and Industry in 1951. For nearly fifty years the building housed the city's collection of working steam engines, locomotives, and machine tools. The star exhibit was the Smethwick Engine, a Boulton and Watt rotative beam engine built in 1779 and first run in 1797 to pump water back up the Birmingham Canal. After decades pumping at Smethwick, then Ocker Hill near Tipton, it arrived at the museum in 1959 and is now the oldest working steam engine in the world. The Woolrich Generator, built on this very site in 1844, was also on display. The museum closed in 1997, and the collection moved to Thinktank at Millennium Point in Eastside when that opened in September 2001.

Birmingham City Council put the site up for redevelopment in 2002. Planning permission was granted in 2006 for a mixed-use development called the Jewellery Box, with 234 apartments rising over the old workshops. Construction started in 2008, and further flats were added over the car park in 2019. The Grade II listed Queen's Arms pub, with its elaborate terracotta facade, still stands next door, anchoring the corner within the Jewellery Quarter Conservation Area. The Smethwick Engine still runs at Thinktank, hissing and rocking on its great wooden frame as visitors watch. The Woolrich Generator sits there too. Both survived the move, and both began life inside or alongside the long-vanished factory whose chemists figured out how to make silver flow through wires.