A Recipe for Diamonds

1906

If Anyone Wants to Make a Few, Here Is the Way to Go About It

Would you like to know how to manufacture diamonds — real diamonds? The process is somewhat difficult, requiring time, patience and some outlay of money, but then consider the possible results! The diamond, we know, says the New York Herald, is simply carbon in a transparent crystalline form. It comes of humble parentage and is brother to the lump of coal.

Unlike easily crystallizable bodies, carbon is insoluble in all ordinary solvents, but molten metals will combine with it. Let the diamond maker choose iron for a solvent for charcoal, melting it in an electric furnace, allowing it to take up as much carbon as it can — in other words, saturate itself with carbon. The crucible containing the white hot metal should then be plunged into a bath of molten lead. The result will be that globules of iron will rise to the surface of the lead and are quickly cooled on the outer surface. Inside the hard crust the iron remains for some time in a molten condition, and, as iron expands in solidifying, the contents of these little globules receive a pressure unattainable by any other means. When the lead becomes solidified some bullets of iron will be found bound up in the mass. Dissolve with some powerful acid first the lead and then the iron, and a residue of carbonaceous matter will be found to contain tiny crystals — real diamonds. Any chemist with a well equipped laboratory can make diamonds in this way, but the largest of them will not be more than a fiftieth an inch in diameter.