Cultured Diamonds Have Extensive History

As the name implies, cultured diamonds are those made through artificial means. In the natural setting, carbon heated under extreme pressure is necessary to create diamonds, and with their many industrial uses, the price of real diamonds made it expensive for them to be used in an industrial setting. The concept of making fake diamonds goes back to Karl Marx who said, in 1867 that if a gem quality diamond could be manufactured, it would create stones costing less than bricks.

H.G. Wells talked about fake diamonds in his 1911 book, The Diamond Maker possibly based on Henri Moissans work in 1893 in which he was able to produce cultured diamonds in a carbon crucible in an electric oven. The experiment was replicated in 1917 and while reading of the experiments, Dr. Willard Hersey of McPherson College successfully repeated the work and his first cultured diamonds are on display in Kansas City.

Since 1954 when Tracy Ha;; of General Electric designed a belt apparatus to provide the needed pressure to turn heated carbon into cultured diamonds, the industrial diamond has been produced in mass quantities. This, or similar techniques are still in use to create the annual 600 metric tons of cultured diamonds, compared to the 26 metric tons of diamonds pulled from mines.

Methods Vary For Different Diamond Types

Today, there are two main technologies used in making cultured diamonds, the original high pressure, high heat and chemical vapor deposition. High pressure, high temperature is still the cheapest method of producing industrial diamonds, with temperatures of about 1,500-degree Celsius at a pressure of nearly 50,000 atmospheres. With chemical vapor deposition carbon and gasses are applied to a substrate, usually silicon, with most cultured diamonds being flat.

The uses of diamond in the cutting industry has been greatly expanded since the successful manufacture of cultured diamonds, especially in the drilling field where diamond-tipped bits are longer-lasting and able to cut through an assortment of substrates. Cultured diamonds are also important in the automotive industry for cutting and drilling aluminum trim. Since aluminum is very hard on traditional cutting tolls, it has greatly reduced the need for tool replacement.

The use of cultured diamonds is very diversified from the cutting industry to electronics, medical and power transmission. Their high thermal capacity allows them to be used as heat sinks in electronics and as conductors in the medical industry. The chemical vapor deposition has also been used to encase circuit boards in the cultured diamonds to provide more protection to the boards.

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