for
sale as watch jewels. The electric furnace has also produced another
product which, while strictly speaking not a synthetic gem, yet is
essentially an artificial one. Imperfect rubies, chips, and small
stones, are fused in the furnace together with the addition of a small
amount of colouring oxide such as chromium. The fused product is then
cut and polished, and the result is a ruby of good colour and of fairly
large size. Emeralds and other coloured stones have been made in the
same way, and so promising has the industry become that the courts have
been called upon to decide what constitutes a ruby. Their decision was
in substance that the word ruby could be legally applied only to the
red-coloured corundum, anhydrous oxide of aluminum, occurring ready
formed in nature.
Reconstructed
rubies however are in the main rightly placed and justly valued, for
they are generally used in large quantities for medium-priced jewelry.
The
French chemists Fremy and Verneuil have succeeded in manufacturing true
gems, rubies chiefly, but also sapphires, by artificial processes. A
title given to gems created by this or similar' processes by man is "
scientific" ruby, emerald, sapphire, or whatever the gem may be. Mr.
Eudolph Oblatt of New York is an American producer of the "
reconstructed" ruby, which has attained some commercial sue-
