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Ch. 7: Shade of Ballantine Hannay

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CHAPTER SEVEN
The Shade of J. Ballantine Hannay
In February 1955, the General Electric Research Laboratory, in Schenectady, issued a statement that was read with great interest, and varying degrees of anxiety, by diamond people all over the world, particularly at De Beers. After four years of experimentation with "high-temperature superpressure," the laboratory announced, it had succeeded in manufacturing dia­monds. These weren't imitation diamonds or diamondlike crys­tals, according to the statement; they were "purely and simply diamonds." A month or so later, General Electric put out a brochure entitled "Man-Made Diamonds," which explained that its research men had produced their stones in a new and powerful pressure chamber by subjecting "a carbonaceous ma­terial" to pressures of up to a million and a half pounds per square inch and to temperatures of up to five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The stones were small—General Electric cautiously said it would be premature to suggest that the pressure cham­ber could produce gem diamonds—but they were perfectly adequate for use in industrial tools.
Shortly after the news came out I spent a morning visiting
Ch. 6: The Cutters Page of 303 Ch. 7: Shade of Ballantine Hannay
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