Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Diamonds Are Forever

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

It has been said that they are a girl’s best friend, they are forever, and that they are the hardest substance in the world.  In nature, they are created deep beneath the Earth at extreme temperatures and pressures, yet in the laboratory, they can be created in a near-vacuum. For all practical purposes, you can’t scratch it, yet you can cut it, and economists have noted the paradox of how it is priced compared to water.  Learn more about diamonds, how they are made, and how they are used, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It has been said that they're a girl's best friend, they are forever, and they're the hardest substance in the world. In nature, they're created deep beneath the earth at extreme temperatures and pressure, yet in the laboratory they can be created in a near vacuum. For all practical purposes, you can't scratch it, yet you can cut it. An economist have noted the paradox of how its price compared to water. Learn more about diamonds, how they're made, and how they're used on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. Before I go into the history of diamonds, I should start with the physics and chemistry of diamonds. As you probably know, diamonds are made out of carbon. That's it.

Just carbon. With four electrons in its valence shell, there are a lot of ways that carbon can bond with other atoms. It is why the chemistry of carbon, aka organic chemistry, has so many different carbon-based molecules. When carbon binds to itself, however, there's only a few ways that it can do it. Those ways, however, can result in materials with remarkable properties. The most common form of carbon is graphite. This is a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon where the carbon atoms are aligned in a single sheet. A single one of those sheets is known as graphene, and when the sheets are found in stacks,

it's known as graphite. Many of the other allotropes of carbon are just different forms of graphene where the sheets are turned onto itself to form cylinders or spheres. Under much higher temperatures and pressures, carbon atoms can align in other ways. In particular, for the purposes of this episode, carbon atoms can align in a 3D crystal lattice to form diamonds. The naturally occurring diamonds found on Earth were all probably created overruner. a billion years ago at depths of at least 150 kilometers or 90 miles below the surface of the

earth. Pressure at those depths could be anywhere from a quarter million to 1.3 million atmospheres of pressure, and the temperatures would be between 1,000 to 3,700 degrees Celsius. Diamonds that manage to come to the surface do so via deep volcanoes. There are only a few places on Earth that have these deposits. By far, the largest is in South Africa, with other significant deposits being in Canada, Russia and Australia. And there are a host of other smaller diamond mines in other countries around the world. Diamonds do have a melting and boiling point, and they can actually burn. If you heat up a

diamond with a torch and drop it into liquid oxygen, it'll completely turn to carbon dioxide. And there are videos done this on YouTube if you actually want to see it for yourself. Melting a diamond is hard because it tends to convert to graphite before it ends up turning into a liquid. Diamond also has the best thermal conductivity of any known. substance, meaning it would make the worst thermal insulator. So if you win the lottery, do not make a house out of diamond. As you're probably aware, diamonds are the hardest naturally occurring substance. Nothing can scratch a diamond. The hardness of a diamond is due to the bonds between the carbon atoms. On both the Vickers scale and the Moes hardness scale,

diamonds are the hardest substance there is. However, diamonds are not the hardest theoretical substance, nor is it even the hardest theoretical carbon allotrope. There's There is a version of carbon called Lonsdale Light, which is a type of diamond that has a hexagonal lattice instead of a cubical lattice as in a regular diamond. Lonsdale Light is very rare, and it's only been found in very small amounts in meteorites, and it's also been created in laboratories. In a pure form, it's 58% harder than a diamond, but in reality, cracks and impurities usually make it less hard.

There are four traditional ways that gemologists evaluate the quality of a diamond. They are known as the four seas. Color, cut, clarity, and carrot weight. The Gemological Institute of America has scales and methods for grading each of those measures. The color of a diamond comes from the impurities of non-carbon atoms that are embedded in the crystal lattice. Pure diamonds are clear-colored. However, there are colored diamonds as well, blue, yellow, pink, green, purple, and black. Yellow diamonds are actually the most common, and the yellow coloration comes from nitrogen. The famous Hope diamond is a blue diamond, and the blue comes from small amounts of

boron that are found in the crystal. Green diamonds come from exposure to alpha radiation. You can see the Hope Diamond yourself on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The clarity of a diamond is something that's determined via a microscope. Clarity refers to blemishes and inclusions on the diamond, and these are not impurities that cause color change so much as just breaks in the crystalline structure. Clarity measurements are on a ten-point scale, from flawless to inclusion two, which means that there's a lot of flaws. The cut of a diamond is probably the most important criterion for determining price. The cut of a diamond determines how light will move through the diamond and will determine its brilliance and how much it sparkles.

A diamond is cut by an expert diamond cutter. They take a natural uncut diamond and they have to make a unique plan for each one to cut it based on the shape of the uncut diamond. Most of the world's diamond cutting only occurs in a few places. The overwhelming majority of diamonds in the world are cut in Surat, India, located in the state of the state of of Girat. Antwerp is one of the other major centers for diamond cutting. The final measure of a diamond is its carrot weight. A carrot is a measure of the size of the diamond. One carrot is equal to 200 milligrams, and a carrot can be measured in increments of 1-100s or 2 milligrams. A 5-carat diamond, which would be quite large and something very noticeable if you were to wear it as a ring, would weigh only 1 gram.

Historically, the weight of a carrot differed in different locations, but a global metric carrot standard was developed in 1907. While diamonds themselves are interesting, it probably isn't as interesting as the diamond business, of which there really isn't anything else like it in the world. The global diamond trade is highly centralized with only a few major players in the world. The largest company, by a wide, wide margin, is De Beers. De Beers is active in almost every aspect of the diamond industry, from mining to trading to marketing. At one point, they controlled 85% of the world diamond trade. De Beers was founded in 1888

in South Africa by Cecil Rhodes. One of the first diamond mines controlled by De Beers was found in Kimberly South Africa, and today it's known as the Big Hole. The Big Hole is, as the name would suggest, a great big hole, an open pit diamond mine. I actually visited it several years ago, and it's really staggering how big it is. They have a viewing platform that extends out over it. But what's really amazing about it is that it was dug by hand. From 1871 to 1914, 50,000 men with picks and shovels dug the hole in search of diamonds. A hole that is today, 463 meters or 1,519 feet wide,

and 240 meters or 790 feet deep. This early diamond mine in Kimberley gave name to the igneous rock which can contain diamonds, Kimberlite. These Kimberlite pipes are what miners'ers. look for when they're searching for diamonds. While most diamond mines are run as proper mines, deep in the ground with machinery, in some parts of the world, diamonds can be found in a method similar to panning for gold. This is the way that they're usually discovered in less developed African countries like Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic

of Congo. Because these diamonds can be acquired so easily with nothing but human labor, they've often been used to fund insurgencies in civil wars by warlords who control diamond-producing regions. These are known as blood diamonds or conflict diamonds. An international program known as the Kimberley process was implemented to track diamonds internationally and to certify diamonds as having not come from conflict zones. While most people are familiar with diamonds as gemstones, and that is the reason why they're mine because of their high value, by weight the vast majority of diamonds are not used in jewelry. About 80% of all diamonds are used for industrial purposes.

The four Cs of color, cut, clarity, and carrot don't really matter for industrial diamonds. These are diamonds that are too small, too low quality, and are usually the residue of the gem cutting process. Industrial diamonds are used for abrasives and cutting tools. Believe it or not, you can actually buy poor-quality industrial diamonds on eBay for a surprisingly cheap price. Diamonds are also used when doing extreme high-pressure experiments. When scientists conduct experiments with extreme pressures, they are usually using what is called a diamond anvil. A diamond anvil is just two diamonds where the tips are compressed in an extremely small area, well under a millimeter, to create enormous pressures.

The biggest change to the diamond industry in the last several decades has been the introduction of synthetic diamonds. As diamonds are nothing but carbon, the recipe for them is pretty simple. There are two techniques for creating artificial diamonds. The first is a high-temper-pressure, high pressure process, which mimics the earth, and the second is called chemical vapor deposition. The first documented creation of an artificial diamond occurred in 1953 in Sweden. This was done via the high pressure and high temperature method, and the resulting diamonds were of poor quality. The first gem quality diamonds were created in 1970 by General Electric, and these stones were all initially yellowish, but have gradually improved over time.

The chemical vapor deposition technique allows for a charged gas to settle and create diamonds over a large surface area, and this could allow for materials such as diamond-coated glass in the future. Synthetic diamonds have been gaining in popularity, which has, of course, freaked out the traditional diamond miners, such as De Beers. Chemically, they are exactly the same. However, you can tell a difference if you look at it in a spectrograph with ultraviolet or infrared light. Synthetic diamonds usually sell for much less than traditional diamonds, and most people can't tell the difference unless you happen to be an expert with special equipment. De Beers has both created a marketing campaign against synthetic diamonds and has also joined the party by creating their own.

The potential for synthetic diamonds is enormous, including their potential as semiconductors. The subject of De Beers' marketing campaigns brings me to the thing that diamonds are best known for, engagement and wedding rings. A wedding or engagement ring is the only time most people actually purchase or wear a diamond. The reason we do this is that it is a tradition that dates back thousands of years to the Roman Empire. No, I'm just kidding. It has nothing to do with Rome. The tradition of diamond engagement rings is a completely modern invention by the De Beers Corporation and their New York advertising agency NW. Ares in 1938.

Yeah, there were diamond rings given by European royalty as early as 500 years ago, but there were all sorts of precious gemstone rings that were made. There wasn't anything particularly special about diamonds. De Beers, having controlled the world diamond market, needed to create demand for their product. They began selling the idea that only diamond rings were true symbols of love. So they spent a lot of money on advertising and promoted the enormous diamonds which would be worn by Hollywood stars. From 1939 to 1979, the U.S. diamond market grew 100-fold. They replicated this strategy all over the world.

In Japan, 5% of women had diamond engagement rings in 1967. By 1981, just 14 years later, it had risen to 60%. Almost 30% of Chinese brides now have diamond engagement rings today up from basically zero in 1990. The adoption of diamond wedding and engagement rings and the idea for men to spend three months salary on one is a total invention of the diamond industry and advertising companies. In 2019, the global diamond industry reached a value of $90 billion. I want to end on something that economists call the Diamond and Water Paradox. Outside of a few industrial uses, diamonds basically have no real use.

They're pretty stones that you can look at, and that's it. Yet, they're very expensive. Water is something that all of us would die without if we didn't have it for even a few days. Yet, despite being vital for life, it's relatively cheap. Why is something useless so expensive, and why is something so vital so inexpensive? The answer to the puzzle led to one of the great revolutions in economics, the idea of marginal utility, of which there most definitely will be a future episode. A consumer doesn't have to choose between all the diamonds and all the water.

If we were forced to make such a decision, I'm sure we would all choose the water. Instead, we choose between the next glass of water or the next diamond. And given the enormous supply of water and the very limited supply of diamonds, diamonds end up costing much more. Diamonds are fascinating chemical substances, which are created by an extreme geological process and traded by one of the few truly global cartels. Given all of the incredible forces at play, both geologic and economic,

diamonds probably will be forever. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorne Thompson and Peter Bennett. I want to give a shout out to the three people who figured out the hidden message at the end of the Morris Code episode. Dreb Scott, Seve, and Yoi 55I all figured out the puzzle and came up with the correct answer.

I'm not going to give away what it was, as I'm guessing some of you didn't even know that there was a secret message at the end of the show. But if you want to take a stab at it, you can re-listen to the Morris Code episode to try to solve it. I also have to give a big shout-out to Dreb Scott, who sent me a 60,000 Satoshi boost

for the Morris Code episode, the biggest in the show's history. In his boostogram, he wrote, quote, I would likely not have gotten my ham radio license if they still required Morse code. That being said, I now want to learn it. Great episode. Dreb, I think that was the case for a whole lot of ham radio operators, myself

included. I only got my license for VHF and UHF bands because of the Morse code requirement, which was required for high frequency bands at the time. That being said, I think it's something if you practice a little bit every day, you could probably figure it out. It's really just the alphabet in another form. KC0 PED signing off, reminding you that if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.