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CHAPTER SEVEN
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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
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