Stone May Become World’s Largest Polished Diamond : Cutter Works Secretly on Fabulous Gem
In a small, windowless room with a rubber mat for a rug, several flat steel wheels that resemble record turntables spin silently on a workbench. Metal clamps shaped like narrow arms gently but firmly press rough gemstones against the wheels for days, weeks, sometimes months, polishing nondescript crystals into brilliant diamonds worth thousands, even millions, of dollars.
One wheel stands out from the others because its tools are unusually large. That is because they were made for a one-time task. When the job is done, the tools will be obsolete.
For here, in a secret location behind bulletproof metal doors that open electronically under the roving eyes of security cameras, a man known only as the master cutter is creating what the stone’s owners hope will be the world’s largest polished diamond.
It is a fabulous but tedious process, full of risks. The slightest mistake can shatter the crystal and reduce it to a mound of dust.
“You have one chance at a diamond like this,” says one person intimately involved with the process. “It’s not like a painter who paints over a canvas and tries again. If you screw up with a diamond, there’s just no going back.”
Like others around the diamond, he agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that his name and the diamond’s location remain secrets. Zale Corp., the large, Dallas-based retail jewelry firm that bought the diamond last year from a European diamond dealer, refuses to identify even the city where the diamond is being polished.
No wonder Zale is skittish. This 890-carat stone, which weighs about six ounces, is the fourth largest rough diamond ever found. It is a full 2 inches high and measures 2 inches in its other two dimensions.
To the layman’s eye, the stone resembles an undistinguished chunk of yellow glass. But to experts, it is an apparently flawless stone--unprecedented for such a large diamond. And its canary yellow color, caused by the presence of nitrogen in the carbon crystal--only makes it rarer than a white stone.
Just how much is it worth? Whatever anyone will pay for it. For now, Zale refuses to disclose the price it paid last year when it bought the diamond from a European dealer, and it has no immediate plan to sell the stone.
“It’s an incredible stone,” says Zale Chairman Donald Zale. “It’s one of a kind.”
Valuable as the six-ounce stone may be, practically nothing is known about its origin or its discoverer. Zale speculates that it came from West Africa. “We have no idea about its background other than it was purchased on the open market,” says Zale spokesman Gary Kastel. “There are no papers with it.”
Zale is happy not to know any more. Somewhere, there might be an early owner claiming that someone bought the stone from him cheap, under false pretenses.
Previous Owner’s Claim
A German news publication has already carried a report about an Italian pensioner who claims that he once owned the diamond. The man, who spent most of his life in Ethiopia, said he gave the gem to an Italian bureaucrat who helped him get his pension. When he later saw the bureaucrat on television displaying the diamond, according to the article, he tried unsuccessfully to contact her and reclaim the precious stone.
But for now, the diamond is all Zale’s. Zale allowed the gem to be displayed briefly last year at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington before sending it to its present, secret location early this year. There, the master cutter has already been at work on the rough stone for nine months. The complete process will take more than a year.
“I have to treat it just like a two-carat diamond or I won’t sleep,” says the master cutter, a quiet man in a dark blue work suit who is nervous about his own security. His interview with a Times reporter was one of the first since he was introduced to reporters last year as a silhouette behind a screen.
A skilled artisan trained in New York, during his 30-year-career the cutter has fashioned many large diamonds, a number of them larger than 100 carats. But in the small world of diamond cutters, who compete to cut the big stones, this diamond is considered the ultimate challenge.
Study Precedes Cutting
Before making a single cut, the craftsman lived with the rough stone for about six months, studying the most minute details, contemplating what lay beneath the rough surface, marking tentative designs with India ink and polishing small facets, or windows, for a glimpse into the stone’s interior. He even practiced cutting on about a dozen acrylic models of the real stone.
At night, he says, he dreams about the diamond. “He’s always thinking one step ahead, wondering what to do next,” says a colleague.
One thing that has not yet been determined is how much extra he will be paid for this job. “You can’t put a price on something that a man’s going to do once in a lifetime,” says his boss. “He is happy to do it because it is a feather in his cap, but he does want to get paid for the job as well. I have never yet discussed with the cutter how much he will get. It depends on how long it takes and the pressures on him. It’s not the kind of thing you want to discuss in advance.”
Usually, it is the cutter alone who determines a stone’s shape. With this diamond, however, other cutters at the firm are being consulted. “Everyone is being very cautious,” says one of the firm’s top executives. He even called Amsterdam to talk to the grandson of the renowned master cutter Joseph Asscher, who cut the Cullinan Diamond, currently the world’s largest, in 1908.
Cutter’s Skill Is Key
Ultimately, the diamond that emerges will depend on the cutter’s skill in pinpointing the stone’s natural wood-like grain, determining its proportions and symmetry and polishing each of the 58 facets required for maximum brilliance.
He uses a steel wedge and mallet to cut along the grain of the crystal and a small, circular saw to cut against the grain. The steel wheel that he uses to polish the stone’s facets is impregnated with tiny diamonds. He has already carved 22 satellite diamonds, a few of them as large as 15 or 20 carats, from the large stone. Before he is done, more than 100 carats of the stone will become sawdust.
Zale hopes the finished stone will weigh 550 to 600 carats, surpassing in size the record-holding 530-carat Cullinan I diamond in the British Crown Jewels. The Cullinan I was cut from a 3,106-carat stone--by far the world’s largest--discovered in South Africa in 1905 and presented to King Edward VII of England on his 66th birthday.
Because of the Cullinan diamond’s flaws, it was cut down into 105 polished jewels. The two largest are in the British Crown Jewels: Cullinan I is in the royal scepter and the 317-carat Cullinan II is part of the imperial state crown.
South Africa also claims the world’s second-largest rough diamond, the 995-carat Excelsior. But the largest polished stone from the Excelsior weighs only 70 carats, and five eighths of the rough diamond was reduced to dust during the cutting process.
The only other rough diamond larger than Zale’s was the Star of Sierra Leone, at 969 carats. It was cut into 17 stones, the largest of which is 54 carats.
Graded Highest Quality
The rough Zale diamond, unlike any of the other three, has a crystalline structure that is practically without flaw. It is classified “D flawless,” the highest grade of diamond, and Zale is banking on that quality to convert the rough stone into the world’s largest cut stone.
“Those diamonds of the finer quality are the most rare of all,” says Liz Dolan, manager of the Diamond Information Center in New York. In 1981, for example, fewer than 50 stones of one carat or more sold in the United States were “D flawless.” When diamonds were popular as a hedge against inflation in 1980, the price of even small stones of this caliber soared to more than $65,000 a carat. Today, they are still valued at nearly $14,000 a carat.
Diamonds, which were probably discovered in India, were mentioned in writing as long ago as the biblical book of Exodus and have been treasured ever since. Over the centuries, wars have been fought and empires toppled over diamonds of lesser size and quality than the Zale diamond.
The Kohinoor (“Mountain of Light” in Persian) was “the cause of more intrigue and bloodshed than any other gem,” according to Victor Argenzio, author of “Diamonds Eternal.” Indian rajahs and later Mogul emperors owned the diamond for centuries until 1739, when a conquering Persian shah followed his country’s custom of exchanging his turban for that of the defeated ruler, who had hidden the stone in his turban.
Subsequent Asian rulers were tortured for the diamond, which eventually was presented to Queen Victoria when the British annexed the Punjab. The queen, in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to improve the gem’s brilliance, had it cut down from 186 to 109 carats. The stone is now part of the Crown Jewels.
Lore of Hope Diamond
Perhaps the most storied diamond in the United States is the Hope Diamond, an extraordinary, deep-blue gem of 44.5 carats that is linked by legend to a blue diamond stolen three centuries ago from the statue of an Indian god by a man who was later devoured by dogs or tigers. A blue diamond of similar description was purchased in 1830 by British banker Henry Philip Hope.
After several subsequent sales, the American diamond dealer Harry Winston gave the gem to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, by mailing it parcel post and insuring it for $151. John White, the Smithsonian’s curator of gems, says the Hope Diamond is the most popular exhibit in the museum complex.
Whether it is because of their mystery or their brilliance, diamonds continue to fascinate the world. “There is something about a piece of diamond jewelry that is inextricably linked with romance,” Dolan says.
When Richard Burton purchased a flawless, 69.4-carat pear-shaped diamond for Elizabeth Taylor in 1969, thousands of people queued up for blocks on a cold day in New York to glimpse the $1.05-million gem in Cartier’s window.
The United States now accounts for more than a third of the world market for diamonds. Dolan says that nearly 16 million pieces of diamond jewelry were sold in 1984, for a total of $7.7 billion. California accounted for 15.4% of all diamond sales, followed by Texas, at 13.3% and New York at 8.4%.
Gifts Account for Sales
Diamond engagement rings make up only about 14% of the diamond jewelry sold each year, Dolan says. About 66% of the sales are gifts to married women, and increasingly, women are buying diamond jewelry for men.
The Zale diamond, when cut and polished into a finished gem, seems destined for greater glory than an engagement ring. For now, even its final color--canary yellow or a paler, champagne shade--is uncertain. So is its shape, which could be pear, marquise or oval.
Nor will Zale say whether it will place the diamond in a museum or sell it, although the man in charge of the diamond has no doubt that Zale could realize a tidy profit on a sale. He says with a smile: “There is always somebody out there who will want to acquire a priceless item.”
