2007: Gemological competence requires more than reading textbooks, and the writer is right. I can imagine what was it like in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the technological advances in gem identification, we still make mistakes. Again, he states that human senses are not always capable of analyzing their observations. Absolutely true. Here is what he has to say.
(via The Journal of Gemmology, No.1, Vol.1, January 1947) Norman A Harper writes:
Informed experience is a faculty of considerable value in any walk of life and knowledge gained by experience remains more firmly embedded in the minds of most people, than does knowledge culled from books or acquired at lectures.
Unfortunately, the human senses are not always capable of analyzing their observations, with the result that experience is frequently ill-informed, and thus of little value.
For countless centuries men experienced the diurnal journey of the sun round the world, and having a prejudice in favor of a geocentric universe, never suspected that in reality the roles were reversed, it being the earth which was the wanderer. By means of the scientific method, the measuring, analyzing and indexing of experienced observation, it was possible, however, to arrive eventually at this now almost universally known truth.
In every branch of knowledge the scientific method has proved its indispensability, and scientific instruments which measure and analyze human observations have become so numerous that a book of some three hundred pages is required to describe briefly the forms and uses of the more important of them.
There is still, however, a remarkable disinclination or reluctance among many to use such instruments, or rather to acquire the technique enabling them to be used. This may be due to a mistaken idea that these instruments require a technique that can only be achieve by long and painful practice and study. If this is so, it had better now be stated that while such study is necessary to grasp thoroughly the scientific principles underlying the use, say, of the telescope, much valuable and accurate knowledge can be gained by anyone, completely unversed in the science of optics, who knows which end to place next to the eye.
Few advances in knowledge have had such beneficent effects upon humanity as those associated with medical science, and few sciences can equal it in the number of the instruments to which its practitioners have recourse. The instruments of physics, of optics, of chemistry, of electricity—to all these the physician turns for aid.
It is hard to imagine a doctor without a thermometer, a stethoscope, and a hypodermic syringe, yet it is possible for him purely by experience and the use of his hands to tell whether or not a patient is feverish, or by his unaided ear to hear the rhonchi or rales which mark successive stages of bronchitis; it is also possible for him to introduce drugs into the body without hypodermic syringe, but who will deny that the use of such instruments makes these operations so much accurate and certain, besides their having other uses and a much wider application.
What, one may ask, is the object of this long preamble? The answer is contained in another question. Does the jewelry trade make sufficient use, in the hands of its numerous practitioners, of the scientific instruments which are available for the determination of the nature of the materials in which it deals?
The writer has within the past few weeks encountered three pieces of jewelry in which there were green stones which experience told him were emeralds, and not only his own experience, but the experience of three other jewelers of no mean capabilities, to whom they were shown. By the use of scientific methods and scientific instruments, however, these stones were proved to be extremely good imitations. As they were mounted in association with diamonds of considerable value, they might have escaped suspicion had not three very simple scientific tests been utilized to determine their true nature. Needless to say, the results of the investigations were a grave disappointment to their owners, who had vigorously asserted their genuineness.
In such cases the empirical method is generally employed, with the result that the truth is never discovered.
There are few trades where such mistakes can be more costly and few trades where accurate diagnosis is so often necessary. Every purchase from the public (and sometimes even from the trade) and every valuation, for whatever purpose, pre-supposes an exact knowledge on the part of the buyer or appraiser of the true nature of the constituent materials of the object to be bought or valued. Yet, in spite of the growing number of competent gemologists, a census of the jewelry establishments in which a bottle of dilute nitric acid and a smooth faced file were the only instruments available (and in a few enlightened cases, one Chelsea color filter), might engage a large number of enumerators.
In such establishments it is not possible to differentiate between unmarked platinum and unmarked white gold, or, for that matter, between either of those metals and stainless steel, and even an approximation of the quality of unmarked yellow gold would be with difficulty arrived at.
But when it comes to the determination of gemstones, the difficulties which beset such establishments would cause shivers of apprehension in a gemologist.
Of course, jewelers in that position can always say that it is possible to ‘play safe’, ‘when in doubt, don’t buy’, or ‘sell?’, ‘when not sure, allow nothing for the colored stone’, ‘buy it as 9 carat (or even when is obvious better than that….15 carat). But surely that is unethical and dishonest. What would be thought of a doctor who said ‘I can’t be sure whether it is colic or appendicitis, so we had better operate?’
A knowledge of gemology and the purchase of a little equipment would resolve most, if not all these doubts. In the case of precious metals, the expenditure of a few shillings and an hour of time with Selwyn’s ‘Retail Jeweler’s Handbook’ are all that is necessary to banish them for ever. Precious stones require a little more attention, but the possession of a few scientific instruments and an easily acquired knowledge of the technique of their use constitutes all that is necessary to transform an empiricist into a scientist, or one who guesses into one who knows.
The cost of these instruments might deter the individual, as it is in the region of thirty to forty pounds, but it should not, under any circumstances, deter a business, or an individual if he happens to be the proprietor of a small business, as this equipment will in a few years pay handsome dividends if used with knowledge and imagination. In any case, the increased confidence to be gained from their use will manifest itself inevitably in more and more successful sales talk.
‘I don’t want to turn my showrooms into a laboratory’ is a remark occasionally heard, but a consultation in Harley Street will be conducted in the atmosphere of a cultured 18th century salon, with gastroscopes, cystoscopes, and even such a pleasant instrument as the microscope, kept well in the background. No one doubts their existence and possible proximity, however, and the certainty that the consultant will take every advantage in diagnosis they offer, makes his advice invaluable as compared with the advice of the greatest physician of medieval times.
What equipment will benefit the jeweler? Here is a list of instruments in the order in which they should be purchased, in the opinion of the writer:
- The refractometer (Tully, Herbert Smith, or Rayner)
- Heavy liquids (Bromoform, methylene iodide, clerici solution)
- Petrological microscope
- The dichroscope
- The spectroscope
The method of their use is fully explained in textbooks written specially for the jeweler, but the first essential is a competent knowledge of gemology.
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