Put it this way. My new dream job is to custom-design cultured diamonds. Specific color patterns. Monster diamonds as big as your foot. They would be worth more than most natural diamonds due to being forms you’d never find in nature, & I’d sell them for a fair bit of money.
I want diamond eyeglasses. And windows. 
Stand back alterego, I found her first.
I saw a Nova episode about this a few years ago. I believe it was titled (wait a sec…doing search…here it is) “The Diamond Deception” (and here’s the transcript) – if they haven’t made progress by now, I’d be surprised if they get anywhere. One of the things they showed DeBeers doing was etching the name “DeBeers” in tiny letters on the diamond to distinguish their product from synthetics. Of course, if it isn’t from DeBeers, it isn’t real, right? :rolleyes:
(Oh, and with the money we saved on the ring, we took a great trip to England–no regrets here.)
DJs are going to like these new diamonds. They will be able to scratch CDs with them.
What’s to stop any foreign company from infringing on any patent? If that were an argument that patents are never tenable, then there would never be any point to patenting anything.
But also consider that great discoveries are often arrived at independently. If an idea is ripe, it’s often just a matter of time until someone else hits on it. I’m pretty certain that we would still have airplanes even without the Wright Brothers, and telephones even without Alexander Graham Bell. You can’t just assume that keeping your invention a secret is always the best course of action, and I just don’t think you can automatically conclude that because someone patents a process, that it must be bogus.
Not really – in the case of some patents, it’s a lot easier to detect infringement and hold the infringers accountable than others.
For example, if you have a patent on a new type fuel injection valve for automobiles.
In the case of a process for creating diamonds, the infringement arguably can be done in secret and the final product that is exported to western nations is difficult or impossible to identify as the results of an infringing process.
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I’m not making such an assumption. However, in the case of a process for creating artificial diamonds, it seems to me you’re better off keeping it secret and taking the chance that someone else make the same invention.
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I’m certainly not making such a conclusion, only expressing my skepticism. I would not invest money in this company. For years people have been making claims about (and patenting) free energy machines, processes for turning wheat into gold, etc. So I’m skeptical of any similar claim.
Are there any practical applications of diamonds that will be more feasible due to these synthetic diamonds?
if by practical you mean use beyond tiaras and rings and sceptors, yes. The Wired article goes on to detail how effective diamonds are for use in semi-conductors.
Gold Dragon - there’s huge possibilities for diamond superconductors in the future.
From this Wired article:
sorry, my first sentence should have read semiconductors, not superconductors.
Especially considering the fact that Alexander Graham Bell got the patent because he scribbled something in the margins that he’d ripped off from Elisha Gray’s work.
Are you busy next week? If not, you may want to catch a flight to Europe this weekend and attend this conference on synthetic diamonds, being held September 7 - 12 in Salzburg, Austria.
The US Navy at the Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) is producing synthetic diamonds for military applications. In fact, one of the speakers at the Salzburg conference is from NRL.
Yep - to the patent-holder goes the spoils.
The egregious example of patents is Dewar and Thermos. Dewar invented it and refused to patent it, so Thermos did and got all the money.
I’m not sure about red diamonds, but blue diamonds are extremely common. You can get a whole bunch of them in a box of Lucky Charms.
But seriously, I think the question of Mined Diamond vs. Cultured Diamond is the same as Big Expensive Wedding vs. Backyard Wedding. The diamond (and the ceremony itself) is a symbol of commitment, of love and sacrifice, that many people find comforting – especially, and forgive my injection of personal cynicism, if they are insecure about the relationship, or if they need visual, tactile reassurance that the marriage is (or will be) a success. It’s something we can show off to other people. It’s a big, showy symbol that we as a culture have taught to appreciate as both a bond of love and a burden of shared commitment (and debt). “I know he loves me, look how expensive this is! It’s all about the rock!” Well, if you pay the same amount for a plastic decoder ring in a gumball machine, or buy a cheap silver-plated ring at a county fair, does the Cultured Diamond have the same symbolic value? I don’t think that many people feel it does. Might as well buy a box of onion rings and propose with one of those.
Me? I don’t care. I’m not married but I’d rather have a plain gold band anyway, and I would hope that the woman I marry has enough perspective to realize that it isn’t the rock that loves her, it’s me. I’d certainly buy a created stone if it were more affordable and if it were accepted; I’d argue that as a newly wedded couple, we more need the money to start off our shared life debt-free.
I’m very, very, deeply suspicious that anybody would sell a diamond ring for $5.00, though. Very suspicious. If I were a businessman with an exclusive ability to create diamonds from dirt and electricity, and I know that a diamond can already sell for $1000, I’d sell mine for $500 instead of $5. I’d make 100 times the profit and I’d still undercut the other guy. Does he have an incentive to sell it for $5? None that I can see.
FISH
I KNEW I recognised this!
It was in an episode of Neighbours!!!
As for my $.02 on the OP, I’m appalled at DeBeers for what they have done and what they currently do. I heard someone call their product “blood diamonds” and I like the nasty sound of that.
Expensive rings are given at engagements because they are supposed to be beautiful, not just expensive. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t think about that and assume more expensive=more beautiful. DeBeer’s understands that.
What I’m hoping to see is these synthetics cut into wild shapes, fires, and colors… stuff never seen before in a diamond ring because cutting a real stone like that would be wasteful. A color-change diamond, or one with irridescence like a black opal would be awesome. And with a diamond’s hardness lots and lots of facets could be cut making a lot of fire.
-k
i bought a bunch of these cultured diamonds on ebay. They are very cool. they are so cheap a lot of the jewlery that uses them is “cheaply made”. So you might want to buy the stones and have a real jewler mount it professionally in a ring or earing.
Your skepticism is quite unfounded. Free energy and spinning wheat into gold are based on dubious science or outright fraud. But there is absolutely nothing unscientific about the two artificial diamond processes described in the Wired article. Scientists have long known what was required to make diamonds, it’s just been a matter of creating the proper conditions in a controlled setting. Small artificial diamonds for industrial use have been around for a good while, so clearly the process worked on a small scale. I really don’t understand why you think it can’t work on a larger scale.
I concede that free energy and matter transformation are a lot more far-fetched than artificial diamonds. But the skepticism is justified IMHO. I’ll believe it when I see a flood of cheap gem-quality diamonds on the market, though.