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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class is a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I'm Eves

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Speaker 1: and you're listening to This Day in History Class, a

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Speaker 1: show that uncovers a little bit more about history every day.

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Speaker 1: Today it's February. The day was February six, nineteen fifty three.

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Speaker 1: A team of scientists at the Swedish electrical company A

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Speaker 1: s e A made the first synthetic diamond crystals. Diamonds

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Speaker 1: have been used for adornment for thousands of years, and

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Speaker 1: they've been valued as gemstones for jewelry for more than

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Speaker 1: a hundred years. In the late nineteenth century, some scientists

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Speaker 1: claimed that they had succeeded at making diamonds. Scottish chemist

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Speaker 1: James Valentine Hannay, for instance, said that he made diamonds

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Speaker 1: by ceiling organic materials with lithium into iron tubes and

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Speaker 1: heating them to red heat and French chemists on Remoissan

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Speaker 1: tried to create synthetic diamonds by putting a crucible containing

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Speaker 1: pure carbon and iron in an electric furnace. He then

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Speaker 1: put that super hot mixture into water, and the pressure

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Speaker 1: generated by the sudden cooling supposedly resulted in diamonds, but

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Speaker 1: none of the experiments were reproducible, and the resulting materials

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Speaker 1: were likely not even synthetic diamonds. Though attempts to make

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Speaker 1: synthetic diamonds continued through their early nineteen hundreds, they were unsuccessful.

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Speaker 1: The structure of diamonds was difficult to reproduce because it

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Speaker 1: required extremely high pressure and high temperature, but American physicist

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Speaker 1: Percy Williams Bridgeman was doing extensive research into the effects

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Speaker 1: of high pressures on materials. He got the Nobel Prize

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Speaker 1: in Physics in nine six for his work in the

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Speaker 1: field of high pressure physics. But in ninety one, the

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Speaker 1: Carbonundom Company, nor In Company and General Electric entered into

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Speaker 1: an agreement with Bridgeman to research diamond synthesis, but this

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Speaker 1: research lasted for less than two years as World War

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Speaker 1: Two was in full swing. In these experiments, though graphite

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Speaker 1: at nearly half a million p s i was heated

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Speaker 1: by a thermite reaction to three thousand degrees celsius or

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Speaker 1: fifty undred degrees fahrenheit, But by nineteen fifty General Electric

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Speaker 1: had begun looking back into the question of diamond synthesis. Physicist,

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Speaker 1: physical chemist, and engineers began researching the chemistry of the process,

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Speaker 1: as well as the apparatus needed for getting the high

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Speaker 1: pressures and temperatures required. At the same time, the Swedish

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Speaker 1: electrical company A s e A was working on making diamonds.

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Speaker 1: In the lab. A s e A turned to a

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Speaker 1: scientist named baltzarvon plot In to look into diamond synthesis.

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Speaker 1: The company hired a team of scientists led by Eric

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Speaker 1: lund Blood to work on the project, known as Quintus.

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Speaker 1: For years, the team experimented with different strategies to create

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Speaker 1: synthetic diamonds, but on February sixteenth, nineteen fifty three, lund

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Speaker 1: Blood subjected a mixture of iron carbi and graphite to

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Speaker 1: pressure for an hour. The press they used had six

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Speaker 1: pyramid shaped anvils that formed a sphere around the sample

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Speaker 1: of graphite. After the experiment was over, a few small

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Speaker 1: diamond crystals the size of grains of sand, were produced,

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Speaker 1: but A s c A did not announce or published

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Speaker 1: the experiments results. In December of nineteen fifty four, the

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Speaker 1: team at General Electric produced synthetic diamonds and reproduced the

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Speaker 1: results The next year, GE announced that its scientists had

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Speaker 1: successfully created synthetic diamonds. It's not completely clear or why

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Speaker 1: a s e A did not report its results, but

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Speaker 1: it is clear that the technique Quintus used was difficult

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Speaker 1: to reproduce. It was also too slow and expensive to

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Speaker 1: be commercially viable, considering the experiment produced very tiny diamonds

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Speaker 1: that were not of gem equality. Since the mid nine DS,

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Speaker 1: plenty of synthetic gem quality diamond crystals have been produced

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Speaker 1: in labs using high pressure and high temperature methods, chemical

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Speaker 1: vapor deposition, and other techniques. I'm each Jeffcote and hopefully

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Speaker 1: you know a little more about history today than you

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Speaker 1: did yesterday. You can find us on social media at

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Speaker 1: t d i h C Podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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Speaker 1: Email still works. Send us a note at this day

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Speaker 1: at I heeart media dot com. Thanks again for listening,

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Speaker 1: and we'll see you tomorrow. M hmmm. For more podcasts

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