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FIRE IN THE EARTH
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hawsers,
field telephones; to help produce high-flying bombing fortresses,
giant tanks that can crush other tanks and trees and fences and men and
crumple the unharvested com, and antiaircraft guns and cannon that will
shoot projectiles thirty miles, and torpedoes that will blow up a ship
with a hundred and a thousand men.
Nature
has produced diamonds that while useless for ornamentation are now
essential for industry. That is why they are generally called
"industrial diamonds," a term which includes stones used for an endless
variety of industrial, mechanical, and scientific purposes. In brief,
you may put it this way: the gem stone is the diamond of luxury; the
industrial stone is the diamond of necessity.
But
if the diamond of luxury gets more publicity and more financial
returns, it doesn't get so much production or distribution. It is
estimated that about two-thirds of the world's diamond production by
weight is used industrially; by value, it amounts to approximately a
fourth—indicating how comparatively inexpensive the industrial diamond
is simply because it can't entice any "ahs" and "ohs," because it is a
diamond that sweats at the wheel and the forge and the drill and does
not rest luxuriantly upon a lady's finger encased in a platinum
cushion, or upon her breast or her wrist
The
gem diamond, like a Hollywood motion-picture star supporting a family
of WPA artists, is the breadwinner in the diamond family. For it must
be admitted that if it weren't for the gem diamond it would be
financially impractical to undertake mining for industrials. The
industrial is an offshoot of the gem. As a mining proposition the
industrial in itself would be out of the picture; we'd simply have to
go back to steel tipped or impregnated tools. Until 1862 the use of
industrial diamonds was small and unim-
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