I Break Three Times Into Diamonds

Louis Kornitzer's book, Gem Trader, is partly autobiographical and partly woven round the lore of pearls. It's educational + explains the distribution chain of gems, as they pass from hand to hand, from miner to cutter, from merchant to millionaire, from courtesan to receiver of stolen goods, shaping human lives as they go + the unique characters in the industry.

(via Gem Trader) Louis Kornitzer writes:

It takes me back thirty-odd years, to the wooden jetty at Port Headland on the Never-Never coast of North-Western Australia, where an enormous stack of bagged ore attracted my ever lively curiosity.
“What’s in those?’ I asked a dock hand.
“Tantalum,’ he said. ‘And there’s the chap that owns it. Lord knows what he’s going to do with it. He don’t. Nobody wants it.’

I could have bought the lot for the price of a round of drinks, to save him dumping it all in the sea, where it ultimately went. But I had never heard of tantalum, or I would have bought that shipload on spec and would not have asked to bother about selling pearls or any other gems for the rest of my life.

The fact of the diamond’s hardness must not mislead you into applying a well-aimed hammer blow as a test for the next diamond you come across. There is no difficulty at all about smashing a diamond into small pieces. Hardness and toughness are two totally different qualities. As a matter of fact, it frequently takes much less than a blow from a hammer to break up a diamond, as the following will show.

Henry Jacques (he who had sent me the diamond-jewelled elephant to sell to non-existent rajahs) and myself—we were partners at the time—sat in Jacques’s Antwerp office. His foreman brought in a stone for inspection. It has just been finished.

‘Let’s guess its weight,’ said Jacques, ‘loser to pay for our lunch.’ Our guesses were duly down and Jacques dropped the stone into the scales. It broke in two.

It was my first experience of the kind. Jacques, who was a good sport, made light of the matter, especially as he had won the guessing competition. It must not be imagined that the stone broke in two at random, for in the diamond there exists what might call a natural tendency to divide along certain planes. It is this tendency of which the cleaver takes advantage when he cut a diamond. The diamond cutter, obviously, must have a sound technical and practical knowledge of crystallography. He also has a carefully developed technique which helps him in his task.

To start with, the stone which has to be split is firmly cemented into a wooden stick in such a manner that the plane of cleavage lies parallel with the length of the stick. The cleaver next holds a steel blade against the diamond in an appropriate position. One sharp short blow with a mallet delivered upon the back of the steel blade immediately divides the stone in the required way. As you can imagine, no little judgment is required when perhaps a matter of several thousand pounds depends upon a single blow.

Apart from this method there is another way of dividing diamond into several pieces. Of late years the saw has frequently taken the place of a cleaver. It is a long process, however, for a good-sized stone takes anything from two or three weeks to cut through. The process is roughly this. First of all the stone to be sawed is notched, and into the notch is inserted a small thin metal disk the edge of which has previously been treated with diamond powder. An electric motor is started and the disk is set rotating at high speed until the stone is divided.

High grade stones are always cleaved and not sawn, and all cleaved stones, grade for grade, are of greater luster than sawn stones. Even experts have sometimes been puzzled by this fact, when to my mind there is no difficulty in finding an explanation. For obviously the complete crystal, cut along the natural line of fission, diffuses the light rays much better than the incomplete crystal of the sawn stone.

Why, then, saw diamond at all? Precisely because in sawing no account need be taken of the line of cleavage and a stone can be divided in whatever way it may suit the owner’s convenience or interest.

The cleavage or sawing of a diamond is only one of the several operations that are necessary before the stone can find its way into the market as a ‘brilliant’. Perhaps this is the right place to point out the difference between the terms ‘diamond’ and ‘brilliant’. A brilliant is a diamond, but a diamond is not necessarily a brilliant. Only after a diamond has been faceted and polished into brilliance does it become a brilliant.

I Break Three Times Into Diamonds (continued)