By 1817, Adam Padley was in business with Whitehouse Wade, as a fender manufacturer.  However, the partnership was dissolved in that year.  Another partnership with John Littlewood lasted no more than a year.  In 1822, Adam Padley was a maker of shoe and butchers’ knives and fenders in Rockingham Place.  This time he partnered Charles Heaton, but Adam Padley & Co was dissolved in 1823.  Padley later formed Padley, Norburn & Co, which was dissolved in 1829 and taken over by Charles Pickslay.  In 1834, he registered the mark ‘Peruvian’ from a workshop in South Street.  In Pigot & Co’s National Commercial Directory of … Scotland and the Sheffield Directory (1837), a full-page advertised Padley as a manufacturer of razors, pen and table knives, and ‘only maker’ of Peruvian Steel.  Padley explained that this was ‘a highly Refined and Purified Steel of a firm and close texture (admirably adapted for Cutlery), the process by which it is made is known only to himself, none of his late partners being allowed (nor any of them competent) to assist in mixing the Compound for Purifying the Steel, or sorting it for melting’.

Peruvian steel cutlery was also marketed at this time by Pickslay, for whom Padley stated he had once worked.  The directory for 1839 carried an advertisement for Padley and his Peruvian steel; so, too, did Drake’s Road Book of the Sheffield & Rotherham Railway (1840).  Despite the advertising, however, Peruvian steel was not a commercial success.  Hebert (1836)¹, i, noted that ‘rival manufacturers sought in turn to amuse the public with Wootz, and Damascus, and Peruvian steel; and each of these were, for a time, necessary to the novelty-loving part of the public.  Time has, however, swept nearly all the notices of these wonders of the day from our shop windows …’  Adam Padley was enumerated in the 1841 Census as a 50 year-old ‘cutlery manufacturer’ in South Street.  He collapsed while dressing on Sunday morning on 27 October 1844.  The inquest verdict on the 57-year-old was death from apoplexy (Sheffield Independent, 2 November 1844).  His burial was at St Peter’s church.

^1. Hebert, Luke, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopaedia (London, 1836)