Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Pearls

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Centuries ago, the most expensive jewelry in the world wasn’t made of diamonds, rubies, or emeralds.  Rather, they were made from an extremely rare substance that was occasionally found inside of mollusks: pearls. Pearls were so valuable that they would only be possessed by kings, queens, and emperors.  Today, the manner in which pearls are made is pretty much the same, but they are more common than at any point in history.  Learn more about pearls, how they are made, and how they have been harvested throughout history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Centuries ago, the most expensive jewelry in the world wasn't made of diamonds, rubies, or emeralds. Rather, they were made with an extremely rare substance that was occasionally found inside of clams and oysters. Pearls. Pearls were so valuable that they could only be possessed by kings, queens, and emperors. Today, the manner in which pearls are made is pretty much the same, but they're more common now than at any point in history. Learn more about pearls, how they're made, and how they've been harvested throughout history. 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 ThruLine podcast from NPR. Some of the most valuable substances in the world are gemstones. gemstones are pieces of mineral that form a crystal lattice at the atomic level. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds are examples of such crystalline minerals.

However, there are some gemstones that are not crystals at all, but are still considered to be very valuable. Opals are an example of something that's considered to be a gemstone but do not have a crystalline structure. Amber is often classified as a precious gem, but it's really just fossilized tree sap. However, there's one substance that is neither a crystal nor a fossil, and it's continually produced by organic means in many parts of the world. Pearls. Pearls are unlike any other gemstone in that they're harvested from a living organism, not mined from the earth. So what exactly is a pearl and what makes pearls so different? Pearls come from mollus, in particular two different types of bi-valves, the saltwater pearl oyster and the freshwater pearl clam. However, it is possible

for a pearl-like object to appear in any type of mollusk with a shell. Pearls are created when an irritant, usually a small piece of shell or a grain of sand, gets trapped inside the flaky flesh inside of a bivalve. In an effort to protect itself, the mollusk will then coat the irritant with a substance called Naker. Chemically, Naker is just C.A. C.O.3 or calcium carbonate, the same stuff that makes up the mineral calcite, limestone, and hard coral. However, Naker has a different physical structure. Under an electron microscope, Naker has very thin sheets of stacked plates.

Naker is also the exact same substance that lines the inside of a shell, and in this form it's called Mother of Pearl. When an irritant is covered in nager, the mollusk will just keep secreting layers, causing the covered irritant to grow and grow eventually becoming a pearl. And that's really all there is to it. Despite how simple the process sounds, naturally occurring pearls are actually extremely rare. The odds of a pearl being produced in a mollusk are only about 110,000. However, even if there is a pearl, the odds are it won't be a very good one.

When you see a pearl in jewelry, you probably are seeing a pearl that is almost perfectly spherical without any blemishes. Just as with mineral gemstones are ways of evaluating and grading pearls. The two primary attributes are shape and luster. Most natural pearls are not spherical, but have an irregular shape. These irregular pearls are known as Baroque pearls. Some broke pearls can still have asymmetry and might be in the shape of a teardrop, and those can still have a lot of value. The luster of a pearl, including its color, has to do with several factors, including the type of mollusk that produced it, the conditions of the water, including things like salinity

and temperature, impurities in the water, and the thickness of the layers of nacre that are produced. There are some pearls known as non-Nakerous pearls, which have little to know luster, but they are still made out of calcium carbonate. Because there are so many variables, even though the odds of a mollusk naturally making a pearl is about 1 in 10,000, the odds of getting a gemstone quality pearl is about one in a million. This is why pearls in the ancient world were considered so rare and valuable. Something like a string of pearls on a necklace would have been so rare that almost no one outside of a king or an emperor could hope to possess it.

So finding a gem quality pearl prior to the 20th century was basically the equivalent of winning the lottery. One of the earliest references to pearl harvesting came from the, Mahavamsa, which was a record of ancient Sri Lanka. In it, it claimed that the best pearl harvesting region was in the Gulf of Manar between Sri Lanka and India. There were also notes of productive pearl harvesting in the Persian Gulf in the Red Sea. The Roman author Pliny the Elder noted that the Persian Gulf produced the finest pearls. China also had a productive pearl growing region in the South China Sea, and remember that productivity is really relative when it comes to pearls.

When the Spanish came to the New World, they found productive purling off the coast of Venezuela near the island of Margarita. In the Mahavamsa, which I previously mentioned, Prince Viajaya, the first recorded king of Sri Lanka, was noted as bringing pearls to visit the king of the Pandayan dynasty in southern India. Julius Caesar had an obsession with pearls. One of the reasons he supposedly invaded Britain was because of their freshwater pearls. And likewise, as a dictator, he banned the wearing of pearls. by anyone other than the highest classes of Roman society.

There was a story told by Pliny the Elder about a bet that Cleopatra once made with Mark Antony. Anthony had a reputation for throwing extravagant banquets, and Cleopatra bet Anthony that she could host a banquet that would cost 10 million Sesterches, or about $30 million today. Anthony didn't believe that such a thing was possible, so he made the bet. And Cleopatra supposedly won the bet by dissolving her mom. most valuable pearl in vinegar and then drinking it. Here I should note that the story is almost certainly apocryphal.

It is true that vinegar, which is an acid, can dissolve a pearl, which is nothing but calcium carbonate. However, there are several YouTube videos where people have actually taken pearls and tried to dissolve them in vinegar to test the Cleopatra story. The answer is that it would take a long time for a pearl to dissolve, long enough that you couldn't dramatically win a bet by just dropping a pearl in vinegar and then instantly drinking it. One of the most famous pearls in history is the Peregrina pearl. In 1513, a large and beautiful teardrop-shaped pearl was found off the coast of Panama. The pearl was given to the

governor of Panama, Don Pedro de Temez, who in turn gave the pearl to King Philip II of Spain. Philip made the pearl part of the Spanish crown jewels, and remained in the hands of Spanish emperors for the next 200 years. It was dubbed La Paragrina, meaning the female wanderer. It remained in the hands of the Spanish kings until Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as king in 1808. He was disposed of after five years, and when he fled Spain, he took La Paragrina with him.

He left the pearl to his nephew, who then became Napoleon III of France. And when he was exiled to England, he sold it to James Hamilton, Duke of Abercorn. The pearl remained in the Hamilton family until 1969 when it was sold at auction. It was purchased for $37,000 by the actor Richard Burton, who bought it for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. It was sold again in 2011 after Elizabeth Taylor's death for $11 million to a private collector. One of the greatest pearls ever recorded was the Pearl of Laut Sue.

It was purchased from a fisherman in the Philippines in 1939 by an American archaeologist by the name of Wilburn Dowell Cobb. The pearl is a giant non-nacarous pearl that came from a giant clam. It measures 24 centimeters or 9.45 inches in diameter and weighs 6.4 kilograms or 14.2 pounds. The pearl was appraised by gemologist in 2007 at $90 million. However, the pearl of Lao Tzu pales in comparison to the gigapurl. Also discovered in the Philippines, the pearl is 27.6 kilometers or 60 psalto. pounds, 15 ounces. And it has been appraised for as much as $200 million. While there have been some very expensive pearls in history, you might be thinking that pearls really aren't nearly as rare

as I've made them out to be. After all, maybe you or someone close to you owns pearls. That's because up until this point, I've only been talking about natural pearls, which are quite rare. Almost all of the pearls which are sold today, however, are cultivated pearls. Instead of hoping that you just might find a pearl by chance, with cultivated pearls, you're helping the process along by growing oysters and adding an irritant to ensure that a pearl grows. The process of cultivating pearls is credited to the Japanese entrepreneur, Kokichi Mikimoto. Mikimoto didn't actually develop the technique for cultivating pearls. That was done by the British biologist William Savile Kent in Australia. However, Mickey Moto did take the technique and developed the first oyster farm in 1888.

It took years of trial and error, but eventually Mickey Moto was able to create consistently spherical pearls, which were indistinguishable from natural ones. He developed a series of innovations that allowed a pearl grower to inject an irritant into the shell of an oyster. In addition to growing cultured pearls, he opened up his own store in the high-end Ginza district in Tokyo to develop a complete vertical operation. Today, the Mickey Moto Company is still the world's largest company dedicated to pearls. However, Mickey Moto no longer has a monopoly on cultured pearls. Pearls are grown in many places around the world. Today, the largest producer of pearls is China, followed by Japan.

Pearl growing industries have been developed in many tropical countries, including small islands in the Pacific. And one of the biggest growers in the Pacific is French Polynesia, where pearls are the single biggest export. They, along with other Pacific Islands, have developed a specialization in growing black pearls. Black pearls are highly sought after and command a premium, although they really aren't black so much as just a lustrous gray. And I should close on one interesting note. As I mentioned, natural pearls are rare. However, every so often, someone orders oysters in a restaurant and finds a pearl in their oyster. It's rare enough that the event will usually make local news.

newspapers. The average restaurant Pearl will usually sell for about $2 to $400, which will more than cover the price of your meal. Today, thanks to cultivation and innovations by Kukichi Miki-Mikimoto, pearls are much more common than they were in the past. Pearls have become cheap enough that they can be purchased by regular people, not just by kings and emperors. No matter how common pearls have become, they still have a compelling beauty and are part of a legacy that dates back centuries. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer.

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