Marvel of the Day, and Perhaps the Century: Man-Made Diamonds

WOW–Read the whole thing (it’s long, but every paragraph seems to have a new jaw-dropper):

Man-made diamonds sparkle with potential

BOSTON — In the back room of an unmarked brown building in a run-down strip mall, eight machines, each the size of a bass drum, are making diamonds.

That’s right — making diamonds. Real ones, all but indistinguishable from the stones formed by a billion or so years’ worth of intense pressure, later to be sold at Tiffany’s.

The company doing this is Apollo Diamond, a tiny outfit started by a former Bell Labs scientist. Peer inside Apollo’s stainless steel-and-glass machines, and you can see single-crystal diamonds literally growing amid hot pink gases.

This year, Apollo expects to grow diamonds as big as 2 carats. By the end of 2005, it might expand to 10 carats. The diamonds will probably start moving into the jewelry market as early as next year — at perhaps one-third the price of a mined diamond.

The whole concept turns the fundamental idea of a diamond on its head. The ability to manufacture diamonds could change business, products and daily life as much as the arrival of the steel age in the 1850s or the invention of the transistor in the 1940s.

In technology, the diamond is a dream material. It can make computers run at speeds that would melt the innards of today’s computers. Manufactured diamonds could help make lasers of extreme power. The material could allow a cellphone to fit into a watch and iPods to store 10,000 movies, not just 10,000 songs. Diamonds could mean frictionless medical replacement joints. Or coatings — perhaps for cars — that never scratch or wear out.

The article goes on to say that at least one company is NOT happy with this development. You guessed it–De Beers:

Even highly trained diamond experts find it almost impossible to tell a CVD diamond from a mined one. De Beers is determined to help by making machines that can detect the slightest difference in the way the two materials refract light.

As part of that effort, De Beers stepped up its own CVD research “focused on producing state-of-the-art synthetic diamonds for testing on our equipment,” Lawson says. Referring to CVD diamonds, he adds, “We don’t see gemological applications fitting into it.”

So by getting into gems, little Apollo made a powerful, determined enemy.

I suspect that almost every guy who has ever had to endure the “two months’ salary” sales pitch for an engagement ring purchase is (quietly) rooting against De Beers.