Portable Stars
Summertime. Late evening. It’s dark out. You open your window.
Star light…star bright…first star I see tonight…If you
could only reach out and grab one…just to hold for a minute.
Well you can…for what else are diamonds if not tiny bits of
stellar perfection wrought by nature?
Suddenly…noise disturbs the serenity. Air raid sirens. Bombs
in the distance. The enemy is getting closer. Run. Come. We need
to escape. To…where? Who would have thought anything like this
could happen? The trick is to take something of value with you
in order to start another life if you should be lucky enough to
live through the present terror. All right. Get some money
together. Small bills. Easy to disburse. Only thing is…a
million one dollar bills would create a pile 42 cubic feet and
weigh near to 2000 pounds. Okay. How about gold. Well, better
maybe. But not perfect. A one million dollar gold ingot would
weigh about 135 pounds. Not easy to carry. Less easy to stash. So
what’s left. Well…there’s a 65 carat diamond out there that’s
worth around 14 million dollars. And it weighs less than half an
ounce. Way to go.
Diamonds are the most portable, universal, and negotiable of all
valuables. During WW II, diamonds saved many lives and allowed
many to start over in a strange land with their portable little
nest eggs sewn into the hems of their clothing as they escaped
from hostile territories.
As to what’s required to in order to produce a saleable diamond?
Well folks…out of a world production of 100 million carats,
less that two and a half million carats produced become faceted
goods over a carat in size. And after cutting…that two and a
half million carats will yield quite a bit less than one million
carats. So…though this may well be a bit dry…let me add one
more little Tidbit of info. Best color and clarity is
D-flawless. Of those that fall between 1 and 2 carats, only
about 600 are found a year.
During its one hundred year celebration, De Beer cut–from a 599
carat rough–a 273 carat diamond which they named the Centenary
Diamond. It is described as “the largest modern-cut top-color
flawless diamond in the world.” Anyone wanna see? Hmmm?
Well folk…to paraphrase Cyrano…I end this refrain with: To my
home page me lads and lassies. Scroll down the table menu. Click
on Tidbit Graphics. And voila!
And there ya have it.
That’s it for this week folks.
Catch you all next week.
Benjamin Mark
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