THE SHADE OF J. BALLANTINE HANNAY 225
But
things have quieted down a good deal since; shares are back up and
business is booming. Of course, we're tremendously curious about
whether—and how soon—General Electric will be able to produce
industrials on a commercial basis. Mind you, we knew they were trying
to do it. We've kept our eye on this kind of experiment for years,
wherever it was going on in the world. A whole lot of people have tried
to make diamonds, ever since J. Ballantine Hannay started the whole
thing off in 1880—and, come to think of it, there must have been people
trying to do it for hundreds of years before that. Did you know about
Hannay?"
One of the other men said, "To tell you the truth, I've had him on my mind for weeks now."
"So
have I," said Mr. White. He turned to me and continued: "Hannay was a
Scottish chemist who claimed to have succeeded in an experiment he'd
been working at all his life. He said he had made diamonds, and he sent
a number of them to prove it, to be examined and tested by a leading
authority of that day in London. Well, the specimens were diamonds all
right. They were tiny specks of things you need a microscope to see
with, but they were, and are, diamonds. You can go and look at them if
you want to when you get back to England: they're in the British Museum
of Natural History in South Kensington. Hannay said he'd manufactured
them with intense heat under tremendous pressure. As I remember, he
used an iron tube, a kind of bomb, and he put in powdered carbon and
bone oil and various other ingredients."
"Eye of newt and toe of frog," murmured the man who had spoken before.
"Something like that," said Mr. White. "Hannay showed his
