34 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
minutes explaining to her “how the
picture did not convey the awesome-
ness of the stone.”
“Is that even a diamond?” Lahri said.
“Yah!” Tlhomelang said.
Lahri, uncharacteristically emo-
tional, said, “You know, we are making
history.”
A
big diamond is always a surprise.
On January 26, 1905, at an open-
pit mine in South Africa, a worker in-
formed his manager, Frederick Wells,
that a shiny object in the sidewall of
the pit was reflecting the rays of the
setting sun. The mine belonged to a
South African of Irish descent named
Thomas Cullinan. The site had not
been in production long, and the pit
was only some thirty feet deep. Wells
clambered down and prized out the
shiny object with his pocketknife. “Cor,”
he said. “Mr. Cullinan will be pleased
when he sees this!”
The diamond weighed more than
thirty-one hundred carats. Up to that
point, the largest diamond ever recov-
ered was the Excelsior, which was found
at Jagersfontein, in South Africa, in
1893; weighing nine hundred and ninety-
five carats, it remains the fourth-largest
diamond ever found. News of a diamond
three times the size of the Excelsior
reached Cullinan that night by tele-
gram, at a dinner party he was host-
ing. Cullinan handed the telegram
around the table and told his guests, “I
expect they are wrong. It is probably a
large crystal.”
The Cullinan, as it soon became
known, is the biggest rough diamond
in history, and one of the most beauti-
ful: a geologist who examined it in 1905
called it “the purest of all the very big
stones.” Blue-white, it contained a small
air pocket that reflected light like a
kaleidoscope. The Cullinan was later
carved into more than a thousand car-
ats’ worth of cut gems. The largest pol-
ished diamond from the stone, Culli-
nan I, or the Great Star of Africa—a
five-hundred-and-thirty-carat pear-
shaped diamond—now resides in Queen
Elizabeth II’s scepter. Cullinan II, a
three-hundred-and-seventeen-carat
cushion-shaped diamond, adorns the
front of her Imperial State Crown.
People have been trading diamonds
for more than two millennia. From at
least the third century B.C., Indian
merchants bought and sold diamonds
that washed up in riverbeds, most likely
as tools for cutting other gems. Pliny
the Elder, in the first century A.D.,
wrote that diamond splinters “were
much sought after by engravers.” The
stones were also worn by rich and pow-
erful people, although, in Pliny’s Rome,
at least, a pearl was considered a more
desirable jewel, because of its rarity.
(Suetonius claimed that the Roman
emperor Vitellius funded a journey
from Rome to Lower Germany by sell-
ing just one of his mother’s pearls.) By
the fifteenth century, diamonds from
India had become more commonplace
in the markets of Venice and other
European cities. The Holy Roman
Emperor Maximilian I is the first per-
son known to have given his betrothed
a diamond engagement ring, in 1477.
He launched a trend among Euro-
pean aristocrats.
In 1866, diamonds were discovered
in Kimberley, South Africa, sparking
the world’s first diamond rush. Two
decades later, Cecil Rhodes founded
the De Beers consortium, which came
to regulate the supply of rough stones,
the manufacture of polished ones, and
the marketplace itself. As a result, the
price of diamonds rose steadily from
the Great Depression onward, even as
the price of other commodities swung
wildly. De Beers has often been called
the most successful cartel in the his-tory of modern finance, and it’s diffi-
cult to propose a counter-argument.
Even the South American drug gangs
that emerged in the nineteen-eighties
were constantly being endangered by
murderous rivals. For a century, De
Beers had the diamond field more or
less to itself.
Diamonds have little innate value,
and De Beers saw that it was neces-
sary to imbue them with mystique. In
the late nineteen-thirties, when globalinterest in diamond jewelry was low,
De Beers hired the Philadelphia ad-
vertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son to
reinvigorate the allure of diamonds in
the biggest market, the United States.
A campaign sent the message to aspi-
rant middle-class men that the only
proper jewel to give one’s fiancée was
a diamond. Prospective grooms were
urged to learn the “four ‘C’s” that de-
termine a diamond’s value: color, clar-
ity, carat, and cut.
One Ayer copywriter, Frances Gerety,
recalled that women formerly wanted
their future husbands to spend money
on “a washing machine, or a new car,
anything but an engagement ring,” which
was considered “money down the drain.”
Gerety changed this perception by cre-
ating the slogan “A Diamond Is For-
ever” for De Beers. Ayer loaned extrav-
agant diamond jewelry to celebrities;
as one of the company’s publicists put
it, “The big ones sell the little ones.”
Demand grew, and so did supply. In the
nineteen-twenties, about three million
carats of rough diamonds were pro-
duced worldwide every year; by the end
of the seventies, the number had climbed
to some fifty million carats.
Around this time, diamond produc-
tion began in various unstable coun-
tries in Africa, leading to concerns about
the use of “blood diamonds” to fund
wars or corrupt activities. In 2003, the
Kimberley Process, a system of certifi-
cation and authentication, was estab-
lished to combat the nefarious use of
diamonds, and to a significant degree
it has removed stones of dubious prov-
enance from the global supply chain;
but they have not disappeared. Dia-
monds also continue to be used in scams,
and in money laundering.
Demand, meanwhile, keeps soar-
ing—particularly from newly wealthy
countries such as India and China—
and production remains high. Even
though there are only a few dozen major
diamond mines operating in the world,
a hundred and fifty million carats of
rough diamonds were produced in 2017,
making it one of the highest-volume
years on record. Several companies, in-
cluding De Beers, have started to make
synthetic diamonds, which are “grown”
in a laboratory, and are cheaper than
natural diamonds, adding even more
volume to a marketplace that also con-