Copies are sometimes made by mistake too. In 1990 I went to work for Yale in NC. One of the VP’s showed me a mortise lock escutcheon that he was proud of for a job they had gotten a couple of years before. A statehouse in a state I will leave unnamed was being renovated and they wanted it to be restored to what it had been 80 years before when it was built. In the intervening years some of the mortise lock escutcheons had disappeared. Someone contacted Yale, who they thought had been the original supplier, about making replacements.
Hardware is many times like the automobile industry in that models change. Anyway, a quote was given and they got the job. The sample escutcheon was sent to the foundry in England where a mold was made and the replacements produced. I am pretty sure that they were excellent copies of the original for when I looked on the back of the one he gave me there was a perfectly clear diamond logo or the Russel and Erwin Co., whose descendent is today known as Corbin Russwin.
BBE.
