-Caveat Lector-
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond_pr.html
The New Diamond Age
Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an
assault on the De Beers cartel.
Next up: the computing industry.
By Joshua Davis
Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless steel
jeweler's loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in
Weingarten's marbled and gilded living room on the edge of the city's gem
district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80 percent of the
world's rough and polished diamonds move through the hands of Belgian gem
traders like Weingarten, a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit
of the Hasidim.
"This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented
English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is
probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars."
"I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him.
He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I
place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and
size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin
10,000 times and never seeing tails.
"These are cubic zirconium?" Weingarten says without much hope.
"No, they're real," I tell him. "But they were made by a machine in Florida
for less than a hundred dollars."
Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering
gems on his dining room table. "Unless they can be detected," he says,
"these stones will bankrupt the industry."
Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure - say, 2,200 degrees
Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres - and it will crystallize into the hardest
material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in
Earth's mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab
isn't easy, but that hasn't kept dreamers from trying. Since the mid-19th
century, dozens of these modern alchemists have been injured in accidents
and explosions while attempting to manufacture diamonds.
Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s,
engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat
saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of
gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in
a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting
out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A second company, in
Boston, has perfected a completely different process for making
near-flawless diamonds and plans to begin marketing them by year's end. This
sudden arrival of mass-produced gems threatens to alter the public's
perception of diamonds - and to transform the $7 billion industry. More
intriguing, it opens the door to the development of diamond-based
semiconductors.
Diamond, it turns out, is a geek's best friend. Not only is it the hardest
substance known, it also has the highest thermal conductivity - tremendous
heat can pass through it without causing damage. Today's speedy
microprocessors run hot - at upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact,
they can't go much faster without failing. Diamond microchips, on the other
hand, could handle much higher temperatures, allowing them to run at speeds
that would liquefy ordinary silicon. But manufacturers have been loath even
to consider using the precious material, because it has never been possible
to produce large diamond wafers affordably. With the arrival of Gemesis, the
Florida-based company, and Apollo Diamond, in Boston, that is changing. Both
startups plan to use the diamond jewelry business to finance their attempt
to reshape the semiconducting world.
But first things first. Before anyone reinvents the chip industry, they'll
have to prove they can produce large volumes of cheap diamonds. Beyond
Gemesis and Apollo, one company is convinced there's something real here: De
Beers Diamond Trading Company. The London-based cartel has monopolized the
diamond business for 115 years, forcing out rivals by ruthlessly controlling
supply. But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gem-quality synthetics has
sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem
Defensive Programme - a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the
public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company
is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help
distinguish man-made from mined stones.
In its long history, De Beers has survived African insurrection, shrugged
off American antitrust litigation, sidestepped criticism that it exploits
third world workers, and contended with Australian, Siberian, and Canadian
diamond discoveries. The firm has a huge advertising budget and a
stranglehold on diamond distribution channels. But there's one thing De
Beers doesn't have: retired brigadier general Carter Clarke.
Carter Clarke, 75, has been retired from the Army for nearly 30 years, but
he never lost the air of command. When he walks into Gemesis - the company
he founded in 1996 to make diamonds - the staff stands at attention to greet
him. It just feels like the right thing to do. Particularly since "the
General," as he's known, continually salutes them as if they were troops
heading into battle. "I was in combat in Korea and 'Nam," he says after
greeting me with a salute in the office lobby. "You better believe I can
handle the diamond business."
Clarke slaps me hard on the back, and we set off on a tour of his new
30,000-square-foot factory, located in an industrial park outside Sarasota,
Florida. The building is slated to house diamond-growing machines, which
look like metallic medicine balls on life support. Twenty-seven machines are
now up and running. Gemesis expects to add eight more every month,
eventually installing 250 in this warehouse.
In other words, the General is preparing a first strike on the diamond
business. "Right now, we only threaten the way De Beers wants the consumer
to think of a diamond," he says, noting that his current monthly output
doesn't even equal that of a small mine. "But imagine what happens when we
fill this warehouse and then the one next door," he says with a grin. "Then
I'll have myself a proper diamond mine."
Clarke didn't set out to become a gem baron. He stumbled into this during a
1995 trip to Moscow. His company at the time - Security Tag Systems - had
pioneered those clunky antitheft devices attached to clothes at retail
stores. Following up on a report about a Russian antitheft technology,
Clarke came across Yuriy Semenov, who was in charge of the High Tech Bureau,
a government initiative to sell Soviet-era military research to Western
investors. Semenov had a better idea for the General: "How would you like to
grow diamonds?"
A few hours later, Clarke was looking at a blueprint for an 8,000-pound
machine that used hydraulics and electricity to focus increasing amounts of
pressure and heat on the core of a sphere. The device, he was told,
re-created the conditions 100 miles below Earth's surface, where diamonds
form. Put a sliver of a diamond in the core, inject some carbon, and voilŕ,
a larger diamond will grow around the sliver.
General Electric managed to do this in 1954 by using a 400-ton press to
crush the hell out of carbon. GE's machine economically produced diamond
dust for industrial uses, and by the early 1970s the company had even
managed to manufacture stones as large as 2 carats. But that effort took so
much time and electrical energy, it was more expensive than buying a mined
diamond. The Russians claimed their machine was relatively cheap, took no
more energy to run than a dozen lightbulbs, and would produce a 3-carat
stone in a few days. And the General could have it for just $57,000.
Clarke was skeptical. On the long flight back to the States he tried to
forget about the offer and sleep, but the light creeping through his window
shade kept him awake. If this thing really could make a diamond, he thought,
$57,000 isn't that much money. "Hell," he mused, "what could be more fun
than trying to make diamonds?" By the time the plane touched down in New
York, he'd decided to give it a shot.
Three months later, Clarke returned to Moscow. Bodyguards met him at the
airport and took him to a warehouse outside the capital. In an unheated room
in the middle of winter, he watched Nickolai Polushin - one of the original
Siberian scientists - lift the top half of the machine's sphere. Polushin
pulled out a small ceramic cube, smashed it with a hammer, and handed Clarke
a small diamond. Everybody smiled. The General eventually ordered three
machines and told Semenov to ship them to Florida.
But there were two immediate problems. First, nobody in the US knew how to
run them. Clarke solved that by moving a crew of Russians to Florida. ("I
felt myself all the time in a sauna," remembers Nickolay Patrin, who now
lives full-time in Sarasota.) The second and more fundamental obstacle was
that the Russians themselves had not yet mastered the process. In fact, the
machines did not reliably produce diamonds.
The General and his newly minted Gemesis needed help. He turned to Iranian
crystal expert Reza Abbaschian, head of the University of Florida's
materials science department in Gainesville. Abbaschian agreed to try
turning the Russians' hit-or-miss method into a rigorously controlled and
more reliable technological process. With the aid of some graduate students,
he ripped out the analog knobs and dials and installed a computer control
system. They upgraded the power supply and methodically tracked the
slightest variation in each diamond synthesis attempt. With more than 200
parameters to control, it was painstaking work, and by 1999 - three years
after Gemesis was founded - the General needed another infusion of cash.
Abbaschian's efforts had produced some very high-quality stones. So Clarke
flew to London to show off a batch to potential investors. Rather than
simply present them as a pile of loose diamonds, he went to a jeweler in
Hatton Garden, the city's diamond district, and asked if a few of his stones
could be set in rings. The jeweler agreed, and Clarke returned to his hotel
room at Claridge's. The phone rang. It was De Beers.
According to Clarke, a De Beers executive, James Evans Lombe, was tipped off
about the synthetic diamonds within two hours of their arrival at the
jeweler's. Lombe asked for a meeting with the General. The De Beers
executive drove directly to Claridge's, and the two men sat down in the
tearoom to the strains of a piano and violin duet.
De Beers refuses to comment on the meeting - or about anything for this
story - but Clarke says he simply placed his diamonds on the table. "When I
told him that we planned to set up a factory to mass-produce these, he
turned white," the General recalls. "They knew about the technology, but
they thought it would stay in Russia and that nobody would get it working
right. By the end of the conversation, his hands were shaking."
But De Beers wasn't backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated
its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines - dubbed
DiamondSure and DiamondView - to the largest international gem labs.
Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size.
Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The
DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory
characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the
DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal's internal
structure. "Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that
could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic," De Beers
scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop
authentication devices. "Unfortunately, our research has led us to conclude
that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument,
inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and
chemically."
In the summer of 2001, Abbaschian told the General that they were finally
ready to mass-produce diamonds. There was one last decision to make. Each
machine was capable of generating a 3-carat yellow stone every three days
(colorless takes longer). Given their scarcity, the price per carat was much
higher for yellow diamonds - so much higher, in fact, that only the very
wealthy could afford them. Plus, colored diamonds have gotten hot in recent
years. (J. Lo's engagement ring? Pink diamond.) Clarke decided that he'd
make the biggest splash by bringing yellows to Middle America. He'd compete
on both price - charging 10 to 50 percent less than naturals - and style.
And, if he succeeded with the yellow stones, he could transition into
colorless.
The diamond industry fought back. Early last year, De Beers began shipping
improved, even more sensitive DiamondSure machines to labs around the world.
Meanwhile, industry groups led by the Jewelers Vigilance Committee have
pressured the Federal Trade Commission to force Gemesis to label its stones
as synthetic.
The tussle goes to the heart of the marketing problem for Gemesis or any
maker of synthetic gems: How will consumers feel about them? The mystique of
natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high
cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful - De Beers maintains
vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply.
Clever marketing may bring buyers around to manufactured diamonds. After
all, there's no chance that they are so-called blood diamonds - stones sold
by African rebels to fund wars and revolutions. And they aren't under the
thumb of an international cartel accused of buying off foreign governments,
despoiling the environment, flouting antimonopoly laws, and exploiting mine
workers.
In fact, Gemesis is developing a marketing campaign that portrays synthetics
as superior to naturals. The General came up with a proposal to brand the
company's diamonds "cultured" - a deliberate echo of the designation given
to the wildly successful (and more valuable than natural) cultured pearl. In
an ambiguous April 2001 ruling, the Federal Trade Commission said that it
was "unfair or deceptive" to call a man-made diamond a "diamond," but
offered no opinion on the question of calling it a "cultured diamond."
So, for now, Clarke is sticking with cultured. But in the end, he insists,
it won't really matter. "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat
stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the
price, what's she gonna choose?" he demands. "Does she care if it's
synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is
that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she
chooses the smaller one."
Wrong, says Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council,
the official representative of the diamond industry in Belgium. "If people
really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," he says,
during an interview at council headquarters on the Hoveniersstraat in
Antwerp. "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was
created last week." So goes the De Beers-backed line. And forget the
cultured pearl comparison, Van Royen says. Man-made diamonds are more like
synthetic emeralds, introduced in large quantities in the mid-'70s. At
first, their price was very high, but then the gem labs discovered that the
synthetics could be easily distinguished using a standard microscope. The
price collapsed and is now less than 3 percent of naturals.
Van Royen is confident the council's lab can pick out synthetic stones. To
test him, I ask him to look at a half-carat light yellow Gemesis diamond. A
jovial, bearded man prone to nervous laughter, Van Royen takes the rock and
peers at it through a 10X jewelers' loupe. "It is very pretty," he admits,
giggling. "But so is cubic zirconium." Although Van Royen's lab is outfitted
with DiamondSure and DiamondView machines (the Diamond High Council works
closely with the Gem Defensive Programme), he instead puts the gem into a
more elaborate piece of equipment - a Fourier transform infrared
spectrometer that registers the diffusion of light through crystal. Above
the machine hangs a large printout that shows six sets of graphs. Van Royen
points to one with a distinctive spike toward the right end of the
horizontal axis. "If it is synthetic, it should look like this," he says.
Sure enough, the machine displays a graph just like the one Van Royen
indicated.
But such high-end testing is far from the last word. Only a small percentage
of larger diamonds are lab-certified - though the number seems to be growing
as the industry becomes more aware of synthetics. Diamonds that are smaller
than a fifth of a carat are almost never sent to labs, since the cost would
eat up any profit made from them. These modest stones actually represent a
significant portion of the market, since jewelry designers regularly use
them to create sparkling fields of diamonds on watches, earrings, rings, and
pendants. Almost all diamonds of this size are bought, processed, and sold
by Indians based in Antwerp and Bombay.
One such group - headed by the Choksi family - bought a $35,000 batch of
preliminary Gemesis research stones last year and is currently selling them
in India at a 10 to 20 percent profit. I met Sabin Choksi, one of the
company's principals, at a jewelry convention in Las Vegas. He admitted that
his customers don't know the stones are synthetic, but says they don't care
one way or the other. In other words, Gemesis may be fully disclosing the
nature of its stones, but already one of its wholesalers is not.
In Antwerp, Van Royen tells me of another threat. There's a rumor of a new,
experimental method for growing gem-quality diamonds. The process - chemical
vapor deposition - has been used for more than a decade to cover relatively
large surfaces with microscopic diamond crystals. The technique transforms
carbon into a plasma, which then precipitates onto a substrate as diamond.
The problem with the technology has always been that no one could figure out
how to grow a single crystal using the method. At least until now, Van Royen
says. Apollo Diamond, a shadowy company in Boston, is rumored to be sitting
on a single-crystal breakthrough. If true, it represents a new challenge to
the industry, since CVD diamonds could conceivably be grown in large bricks
that, when cut and polished, would be indistinguishable from natural
diamonds. "But nobody has seen them in Antwerp," Van Royen says. "So we
don't even know if they are for real."
I take a transparent 35-millimeter film canister from my pocket and put it
on the table. Two small diamonds are cushioned on cotton balls inside.
"Believe me," I say, "they're for real."
Three days before traveling to Belgium, I had flown to Boston to meet Bryant
Linares, president of Apollo Diamond. Linares has been secretive about his
company and was suspicious about me. He checked to make sure I was really
working for Wired by calling my editor, and he wouldn't say where his
company was located other than to tell me to fly to Boston and wait for him
at baggage claim.
When I arrive, a preppy, square-jawed man approaches me.
"I'm Bryant Linares," he says. "Follow me."
We get in his blue Saab and begin driving. In a half hour, I realize I'm
seeing the same scenery. I ask if we're driving in circles. "We're not
taking the most direct route," he allows. For 45 minutes, he questions me
about stories I'd written. Finally he seems to decide I'm not a De Beers
spy. "You're OK," he says. "There's no need for a blindfold."
We pull up at a suburban strip mall occupied by a fitness gym and a graphic
design company. Linares leads the way into the graphics firm's reception
area, which looks normal enough. But when he opens one of the interior
doors, I catch a glimpse of a man dressed head to foot in Intel-style
clean-room scrubs.
"Welcome to Apollo Diamond," Linares says, waving me inside and quickly
shutting the door. He hands me a bunny suit, including booties, goggles, and
a hair cap, and leads me into a third room. Three men dressed in similar
contaminant-control outfits stand around a cylindrical contraption that
looks like a heavy-duty coffee urn outfitted with a bolt-on porthole. A
preternatural purple-green glow emanates from the window.
I peer through the glass. Four diamonds are growing beneath a shimmering
green cloud. "It took me a long time to get to this point," says one of the
men standing beside the machine. This is Robert Linares, Bryant's father. In
the 1980s, he was a well-known researcher in advanced semiconductor
materials. His company, Spectrum Technology, pioneered the commercialization
of gallium arsenide wafers, the microchip substrate that succeeded silicon
and allowed cell phones to become smaller and handle more bandwidth. Linares
sold the company to PacifiCorp, a diversified utility, in 1985 and
disappeared from the semiconducting world.
It turns out he took the money and built a secret diamond research lab. "I
knew diamonds were going to be the ultimate semiconductor at some point, but
everybody thought it was impossible at the time," Linares says. "I had the
freedom to do what I wanted after I sold my company, so I spent almost 15
years researching on my own."
To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must
first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and
pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal.
Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the
single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the
beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found
it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which
already is producing flawless stones.
By January, Apollo plans to start selling them on the jewelry market. But
that's just the first step. Robert and Bryant Linares expect to use revenue
from the gem trade to fund their company's semiconductor ambitions. Not
surprisingly, the diamond industry is hostile to the idea, as the younger
Linares discovered four years ago when he attended an industry conference in
Prague. He was hoping to find out whether any other researchers - possibly
De Beers scientists themselves - had discovered the sweet spot. During a
break in the conference, a man approached Linares and told him to be
careful. "He said that my father's research was a good way to get a bullet
in the head," Linares recalls.
The diamond industry is in fact even more concerned about gems made using
chemical vapor deposition than it is about Gemesis stones, though Gemesis
poses a more immediate threat. The promise of CVD is that it produces
extremely pure crystal. Gemesis diamonds grow in a metal solvent, and tiny
particles of those metals get caught in the diamond lattice as it grows. CVD
diamond precipitates as nearly 100 percent pure diamond and therefore may
not be discernible from naturals, no matter how advanced the detection
equipment.
But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is
ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be
affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for
example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of
the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike
fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape,
with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since
Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing
increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using
that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is
producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by
year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.
Back at the Diamond High Council, I open the film canister and shake the
Apollo stones onto the table. Van Royen tentatively picks one up with a pair
of elongated tweezers and takes it to a microscope. "Unbelievable," he says
slowly as he peers through the lens. "May I study it?" I agree to let him
keep the gems overnight. When we meet the next morning in the lobby of the
High Council, Van Royen looks tired. He admits to staying up almost all
night scrutinizing the stones. "I think I can identify it," he says
hopefully. "It's too perfect to be natural. Things in nature, they have
flaws. The growth structure of this diamond is flawless."
Van Royen reluctantly hands the diamonds back. "You have something that
nobody else in Antwerp has." he says. "You should be careful - somebody
might jump out of the shadows with a mask on." He leans in conspiratorially:
"If you want to know how important these diamonds are, talk to Jim Butler
with your Navy. He is the man."
Jim Butler is the head of a project known as Code 6174 - the Navy's diamond
research arm, which is housed in a guarded facility outside Washington, DC.
A civilian scientist, Butler has been been researching CVD diamond and
semiconducting for the military for 16 years, long enough to see plenty of
failure in the field. But today, he's more optimistic than ever. There have
been three long-standing roadblocks to diamond semiconducting - and each of
them appears to be on the verge of falling. First, diamond is viewed as
wildly expensive, due to the artificial scarcity that De Beers maintains
with its lock on the market. Synthesized diamonds created outside of the
cartel will greatly reduce that problem. Second, there has never been a
steady and dependable supply of large, pure diamonds. You can't depend on
mined diamonds, as there is no way to ensure that each stone will have the
same electrical properties as the next. Apollo's CVD diamonds solve that.
The third big challenge has been the most daunting for materials scientists:
To form microchip circuits, positive and negative conductors are needed.
Diamond is an inherent insulator - it doesn't conduct electricity. But both
Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which
creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to
manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient
conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his
glee. "There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together
with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of
inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond.
"We now have a p-n junction," Butler says. "Which means that we have a
diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond
Pentium chip on the horizon."
Still, Butler is frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the US
computer business. "Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond
semiconductor research," he says, citing the Japanese government's
announcement in December that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to
build a first-generation diamond chip. "Bob Linares has given the US the
advantage, but nobody's paying any attention," he says. "If we're not
careful, the Japanese or the Europeans are going to claim the diamond
niche."
Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest
research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly
understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a
seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's
director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to
evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not
about to abandon that."
But someday, that's exactly what chipmakers will be forced to do. Just ask
Bernhardt Wuensch, an MIT professor of materials science. "If Moore's law is
going to be maintained, processors are going to get hotter and hotter," he
tells me. "Eventually, silicon is just going to turn into a puddle. Diamond
is the solution to that problem."
The JCK Show is one of the biggest events in the jewelry business. It draws
every major diamond dealer in the US, most of whom buy their goods from De
Beers. This year, for the first time, the General tried to get a booth. He
was told that he'd applied too late. He suspected that the industry simply
didn't want him there, but he took it gracefully and announced that Gemesis
would unveil its stones at a smaller satellite convention down the street.
I head to Las Vegas to check it out. The Gem and Lapidary Dealers
Association Show is held in a large room at the back of the Mirage. Here -
amid purveyors of quartz-encrusted, electric-powered water fountains ("Be
amazed by their magic!"), Lithuanian amber salesmen, Nigerian tanzanite
dealers, and Vegas-style cowboys in ostrich skin boots - is the Gemesis
booth, which displays more than 1,000 carats of yellow diamonds. The show
ends tonight, and JCK starts tomorrow morning, so the last few hours see a
whirlwind of recently arrived JCK-bound buyers. Efraim Katz, a
yarmulke-clad, heavily bearded gem wholesaler from Miami, literally jogs
through the room but pauses in front of Gemesis.
"Diamonds mined in Florida?" he asks a Gemesis rep. "I can't believe it.
Give me your number - I will be calling."
Kevin Castro, a jeweler in Cedar City, Utah, comes to a surprised halt.
"These are awfully pretty," he says.
I tell him that they are man-made and ask if that bothers him.
"If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it's not grown in some
steamy hot jungle in Central America," he says. "It's grown in a hothouse
somewhere in California. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a
beautiful orchid."
"Do you care that it's not from De Beers?" I ask.
"De Beers?" he says. "Nobody cares if it's from De Beers. My clients just
want a nice diamond."
How to Make a Diamond
The Gemesis Way:
High pressure, high temperature. Crystal is created in a chamber that mimics
geologic conditions.
1. Place metal solvents and graphite in ceramic growth chamber. Insert
diamond seed at bottom of chamber and put chamber in center of compression
sphere.
2. Force oil into top layer of sphere, creating pressure against steel
anvils. Increasing pressure is transferred through anvils and onto growth
chamber. Even with minimal pressure at surface, force at center reaches
58,000 atmospheres.
3. Turn on juice. Current wired to one end of ceramic chamber raises
temperature to 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat and pressure cause graphite -
pure carbon - to atomize. Freed carbon drawn to cooler end of chamber bonds
to diamond seed, crystallizing layer by layer.
4. Wait three days.
5. Open machine. Smash growth chamber, pull out stone. Cut and polish to
make sparkling diamond gem.
The Apollo Way
Chemical vapor deposition. Crystal is formed when a plasma cloud rains
carbon onto diamond wafers.
1. Place diamond wafers on pedestal. Depressurize chamber to one-tenth of an
atmosphere.
2. Inject hydrogen, natural gas (CH4) into chamber. Heat with microwave
beam. At 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, electrons separate from nuclei, forming
plasma.
3. Let it rain. Freed carbon precipitates out of plasma cloud and is
deposited on wafer seeds.
4. Let it grow. Wafer seeds gradually become diamond minibricks, building up
at half a millimeter a day.
5. Open chamber and remove diamond brick. Slice into wafers for
semiconductors or cut and polish to make gems.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contributing editor Joshua Davis ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote about the Army's
tactical Internet brigade in Iraq in Wired 11.06.
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directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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