ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTION OF DIAMONDS.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3538, 28 April 1880, Page 2

ARTIFICIAL PRODUCTION OF DIAMONDS.

Mr N. Story Maskelyne, of the British Museum Mineralogical Department, writes:—"A few weeks since I had to proclaim the failure of one attempt to produce the diamond ia a chemical, laboratory. I now ask a little space in one of your columns ia order to announce the.entire success of such an attempt by another Glasgow gentleman. The gentleman is Mr J. Ballantine Hannay, of Woodbourue, Helensburgb, and Sword street, Glasgow, a Fellow of the Chemical Society of London, who has sent me some small crystallised particles presenting exactly the appearance of fragments of a broken diamond. In lustre, in a certain lamellar structure on the surfaces of cleavage, ia refractive power, they accorded so closely with that mineral that it seemed hardly rash to proclaim them eren at first sight to be diamond. Aud 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 scoored deep grooves ia a polished surface of sapphire, which the diamond alone can do. I was able to measure 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 angle so measured on the ganiometer was 7Odeg. 29min., the correct angle on a crystal of the diamond being 70deg; 317min. 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 Bolting this problem, and removing from the science of chemistry an approbrinm so long adhering 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 crystallised by man till Mr Hannay achieved the triumph which I have the pleasure of recording. His process for effecting this transmutation, 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.