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THE DIAMOND
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bellied.
The shape of the facets also differs from those of the brilliant-cut
and there are eighty of them. The table is replaced by a low pyramid of
facets meeting at a point in the center. It has not proved popular.
A
process of grooving diamonds has been patented. Parallel grooves around
stones having 8, 10, 12, or 18 sides are sometimes cut and regular
facets are cut concave. Diamonds cut thus have not yet appeared on the
market.
In
Amsterdam there are 64 factories with an aggregate of 7,000 mills and
employing about 9,000 persons. Wages of setters, cutters, and
polishers, range from about ten to fourteen dollars per week. Cleavers
are paid from fourteen to twenty dollars per week. Ten hours is the
working day. Antwerp employs from 4,000 to 5,000, of whom 70 are women.
Sorters get six to ten dollars per week and the other workers are paid
about the same as those of Amsterdam. In Paris there are a number of
cutting shops, but very few of them are for cutting diamonds only. It
is so also in London, therefore neither city is regarded as an
important center of the cutting industry.
Cutting
in the United States was first begun about 1866. Mr. Henry D. Morse of
Boston, who soon had a good reputation for fine cutting, operated up to
fifteen or twenty mills. A few later followed his lead, mostly as
repairers only, however, but about 1881 the old New York diamond
importing house, Randel & Baremore, afterwards Randel, Baremore
& Billings, opened a cutting shop in connection with their
importing business, under the management of John B. Humphrey, the
diamond cutter of Boston. Later the shop was in the
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