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:
The second operation is the so-called bruting, when two stones, each of them a diamond, are rubbed against each other in order to rough shape them. You need not imagine that the small particles which come off in the process of bruting are allowed to go to waste. Every precaution is taken to save the diamond powder that flies on to the floor and among the workmen’s clothing, and the weights of the rough stones and the finished products are carefully checked, so that not the tiniest fraction of a carat escapes. The grains are collected and added to the stock of diamond dust, which is indispensable for the third operation in the making of a diamond.
It is literal fact that only diamond cuts diamond. If a diamond cutter has no diamond dust, he cannot hope to coax a stone into mirroring light. Incidentally, it may be here remarked that a brilliant has the property of absorbing light rays and giving them out again in the dark. That peculiarity is known as phosphorescence, a word that suggests that this property is due to some chemical action within the stone, which, of course, is not the case.
When the stone has been rough-shaped and is ready for faceting and subsequent polishing, it must be fitted into some contrivance, for it would be impossible for the cutter to hold it in his bare fingers against a metal disk revolving at high speed. The device used is a copper holder into which the stone is securely fixed, and the manner of fixing it is technically described as ‘soldering’.
Now the stone is ready to receive its first facet. It is held down against a porous cast-iron wheel which has previously been edged with a liberal mixture of oil and find diamond dust. The wheel turns with a speed of some 2500 revolutions per minute. Skeif is the technical name for such a wheel, and the holder containing the stone is known as a dop. The diamond powder is prepared by pounding in a mortar small, discolored, badly flawed or broken crystals of diamond which have no jewel value.
For the final operation, that of polishing, steel, leather and felt disks are used, and the diamond powder applied to these removes the last vestiges of roughness and all scratches or surface blemishes. If any drilling has to be done, the drill to be used is tipped with a diamond splinter. The diamond has now finished with the beauty parlor and is ready to face the critical world.
All these processes have been perfected only in comparatively recent times. But yet, as has been said, gem cutting in its crude form has been known since antiquity. There are on exhibit in the Museum at Cairo, stones which, although they have been only crudely cut, bear witness to the fact that gem cutting was practised in Egypt in the early part of the third dynasty, which takes us back to 4777-4515 B.C. The craft has persisted in some sort in every civilized country ever since. For instance, thirteenth-century Paris boasted a gem cutter’s guild, and a similar guild flourished in the German city of Nuremberg round about 1370. At that period, too, Bruges, in Flanders, was already playing a leading part in the art of gem cutting, and one of the burghers of that city, Ludwig van Berghen, revolutionized diamond cutting by being the first to use a perfectly symmetrical and scientific arrangement of facets.
It was to this famous Flemish diamond cutter that Charles the Bold sent three diamonds for the purpose of having them faceted after the new fashion. Amongst these stones was one that measured three-eighths of an inch along one edge, and is said to have been the first known pyramidical stone of any important size. The stone was subsequently stolen from its royal owner’s tent or taken as loot on the battlefield by a common soldier. From fear of discovery or from ignorance of its great value, the thief cast it aside, but then recovered it and sold it to a known priest, who returned it to its owner and received a good reward. Then the diamond passed into the hands of the Bernese Government, which in turn sold it to Jacob Fugger, a member of the famous family of Augsburg merchants, for the enormous sum of 47000 florins.
But the great stone did not abide with the Fuggers. It came back to royalty in the shape of Henry VIII of England, and from him passed to his daughter Queen Mary I, who gave it to Philip of Spain. The rest of its history is obscure. It may still be a part of the Spanish crown jewels, wherever they may be, or more probably became a part of the Hapsburg treasures.
It was the Portuguese Jews from Lisbon who brought gem cutting to England and made Hatton Garden a world center for the gem trade. For when religious intolerance drove them from Portugal, as it had already driven their brethren from Spain, the justly famed Lisbon diamond cutters brought a lucrative new trade to the country which sheltered them in their exile.
While the luxury-loving and moneyed classes had to depend for diamonds upon the meagre supplies from India, Brazil and other minor sources, large stones—that is, stones over thirty carats—were so rare that a prominent London jeweler (E.W.Streeter), who was as well informed on the subject as anyone in Europe, was able to say that to the best of his belief there were no more than a hundred such stones in the whole world. Of these, in his opinion, fifty were in Europe and the rest divided between Persia, India and Borneo.
But the discovery of large diamond deposits in South Africa and the intensive mining with up-to-date methods has changed all this, and there are now a large number of considerable stones distributed over the five continents. Yet the value of big gems has gone not down, but up. A forecast of Streeter’s, made without knowledge of the new factor of South Africa, that the value of really large stones would be greatly enhanced in the future, has been fully borne out. This is due to the restrictions by the controllers of world stocks. It would, of course, benefit nobody if enormous quantities of quality diamonds were unloaded on the market, and it would harm many.
It is not by accident that practically all the outstanding stones of the old days were found in the possessions of royal personages. From very early times, for instance, the sovereigns and ruling princes of India took unto themselves all stones of any size that were found in their dominions. Some writers say that any stone over thirty carats had to be handed over, others that stones of over ten carats must be given up, surrendered to the royal treasury. None of the accounts state, however, whether the finder of the stone or the owner of the land received adequate compensation.
Whether they received any sort of gift or not, ex gratia, I feel inclined to doubt ‘adequateness’, not because of Indian princes are less just or more rapacious than other men who can force their will on their weaker fellows, but because I have known by personal experience the workings of a similar ordinance. This was in the Sulu Archipelago, where I once operated my fleet of pearling craft. The Sultan of Sulu was entitled to have first offer of all pearls found in his territorial waters (this applied to native fishing vessels and naked divers only, not to white owners). The Sultan would be shown a stone of size. If he liked the look of it he put his own price on it, and the finder had to accept what was offered if he valued his head. If the Sultan was not interested, the finder paid a mere ten percent of the pearl’s value into the royal treasury, but valuation was gain with His Highness. Naturally he did not put too high a value on a stone he liked or too low a value on one he had not use for. And Sultan Jamalal Kiram II was not such a bad sort at that, may he rest in peace. A greater tyrant could have made a greater profit than he ever bothered about.
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