LABORATORY DIAMONDS

Evening Star, Issue 25353, 8 December 1944, Page 8

LABORATORY DIAMONDS

USE IN INDUSTRY More than 60 years ago, a Scottish chemist and engineer, James Bannan--tyre Hannay, claimed to have manufactured diamonds by a laboratory method, but his claim was " not generally 'admitted in scientific circles " (writes a London correspondent of the ' Sidney Morning Herald '). Now the tiny crystals, which be deposited in the British Natural History Museum at South Kensington, have been shown to be diamonds beyond all doubt. The proof has been supplied by Dr Kathleen Londsdale, msing a * new method of X-ray photography, which also supports the claim that the diamonds were made in a laboratory. (Recent experiments have shown that it is possible by X-ray photography to detect the vibrations of.atoms and to learn something of the forces which hold atoms together. These developments have involved the building of very powerful electrical equipment, bv the use of which every different kind of material yields photographs, which are unique. They are the " fingerprint's " of substance. Less than a 10,000 th of a gram of a substance is sufficient to identify it. None of the few specks of crystalline dust on a glass slide resulting' from Hannay's experiments weighs more than about a 20,000 th of a gram, but the new X-ray methods have identified them as diamonds. When Hannay originally claimed that they were diamonds made in the laboratory lie was supported by the Keeper of Minerals at the British Museum, but received little support from other scientists. It was generally stated that the crystals were probably a form of carborundum. Hannay said that only seven of his 124 experiments had been successful. His entire apparatus, he said, exploded time after time, and he never attempted to exploit his method. The importance of the confirmation of his success is not that it opens a vista of tiaras for every woman, but because two tons, three-quarters of the total annual world output nf diamonds, are used annually for industrial purposes. They are consumed in the process, and reserves probably are not inexhaustible. i