The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-02-28 00:00:00

THE ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTION OF
DIAMONDS.

Mr. N. Btory-Maskelyne, of the Mineral Department,
British Museum, writes to The Times as follows :
A few weeks since I had to proclaim the failure
of one attempt to produce the diamond in a chemi-
cal laboratory. To-day I ask a little space in one
of your columns in order to announce the entire
success of such an attempt by another Glasgow
gentleman.
That gentleman is Mr. J. Ballantine Hannay, of
Woodbourne, Helensburgh, and Sword street,
Glasgow, a Fellow of the Chemical Society
of London, who has to-day sent me some small
crystalized particles presenting exactly the ap.
pearance of fragments of a broken diamond.
In future, in a certain lamellar structure on
the surfaces of cleavage, in refractive power, they
accorded so closely with that mineral that it seemed
hardly rash to proclaim them even at first sight to be
diamond. And they satisfy the characteristic tests of
that substance. Like the diamond, they are nearly
inert in polarised light, and their hardness is such that
they easily scored deep grooves in a polished surface of
sapphire, which the diamond alone can do. I was able
to nvasure the angle between the cleavage faces of one
of them, notwithstanding that the image from one face
was too incomplete for a very accurate result. But
the mean of the angles so measured on the goniometer
was 70 deg. 29 min., the correct angle oa a crystal of
the diamond being 70 deg. 31'7 min. Finally, one of
the particles, ignited on a foil of platinum, glowed
and gradually disappeared exactly as mineral diamond
would do. _ _

There is no doubt whatever that Mr. Hannay has
succeeded in solving this problem and removing from
the science of chemistry an opprobrium BO long adher-
ing to it; for, whereas the larger part of the great
volume recording the triumphs of that science is
occupied by the chemistry of carbon, this element has
never been crystallized by man til Mr. Hannay
ached the triumph which I have the pleasure of
recording to-day, His process for effecting this trans.
mutation, hardly less momentous to the arts than to the
possessors of a wealth of jewellery, is on the eve of being
announced to the Royal Society.

In connection with the above, The Times also publishes
the following, from " R. H. D." :
Sir,—ln reference to Mr. Maskelyne's letter on the
above subject, will you permit me to state that Mr. A.
H. Allen, borough analyst of Sheffield, in a very
interesting paper on "The Artificial Production of
Precious stones," read before the Literary and Philo-
sophical Society of this town, distinctly anticipated
that Mr. Hannay would be successful? After review-
ing various abortive attempts, Mr. Allen, in his paper,
which was reported at considerable length in the
Sheffield Daily Telegraph at the time, said :—" Another
direction in which the artificial production of
the diamond may be looked for is in the curious fact
recently discovered by Mr. J, B. Hannay, a Scotch.
man, that gases under high pressure have a very
marked power of dissolving solids. This extraordinary
discovery has a bearing on a recently reported sponta-
neous rupture of a diamond, as described by Professor
Leedy, of Philadelphia. He estimates, with very
great probability, that the explosion was due to the
presence of a cavity containing highly-compressed
gases, which he supposes to have been carbonic acid.
If this supposition should prove to be true, it will
throw an enormous light on the formation of the
diamond, and prove the key to its artificial production."