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Hope Diamond

The Hope Diamond is a 45.52 carat diamond that has been famed for its great size since the 18th century. Extracted in the 17th century from the Kollur Mine in Guntur, India, the Hope Diamond is a blue diamond. Its exceptional size has revealed new information about the formation of diamonds.

The Hope Diamond is a Golconda diamond. Its recorded history begins in 1666, when the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased it in India in uncut form. After cutting the gem and renaming it "the French Blue" (Le bleu de France), Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792 and re-cut, with the largest section of the diamond appearing under the Hope name in an 1839 gem catalogue from the Hope banking family, from whom the diamond's name derives.

The Hope Diamond's last private owner was the American jeweler Harry Winston, who bought it in 1949 from the estate of the mining heiress and socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean. After exhibiting the diamond on tour for several years, Winston donated it in 1958 to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where it remains on permanent exhibition.

Classification

The Hope Diamond is a large, 45.52 carat, deep-blue diamond, studded in a pendant Toison d ’or. It is a dark greyish-blue color under ordinary light due to trace amounts of boron within its crystal structure, and it exhibits a red phosphorescence under exposure to ultraviolet light. It is classified as a type IIb diamond.

The Hope Diamond is currently housed in the National Gem and Mineral collection at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It has changed hands numerous times on its way from Hyderabad, India, to France, Great Britain, and the United States, where it is on public display. It has been described as the "most famous diamond in the world".

Physical properties
"You cradle the 45.5-carat stone—about the size of a walnut and heavier than its translucence makes it appear—turning it from side to side as the light flashes from its facets, knowing it's the hardest natural material yet fearful of dropping it."
 * Weight: In December 1988, the Gemological Institute of America's laboratory determined the diamond to weigh 45.52 carat.
 * Size and shape: The diamond has been compared in size and shape to a pigeon egg or a walnut that is pear-shaped. The length, width, and depth are 25.60 mm × 21.78 mm × 12.00 mm (1 in × 7/8 in × 15/32 in).
 * Color: It has been described as being a "fancy dark greyish-blue" as well as "dark blue in color," or having a "steely-blue" color. Blue diamonds similar to the Hope can be shown by colorimetric measurements to be grayer (lower in saturation) than blue sapphires. In 1996, the Gemological Institute of America examined the diamond and, using their proprietary scale, graded it fancy deep grayish blue.Hope Diamond Closeup.jpg Visually, the gray modifier (mask) is so dark (indigo) that it produces an "inky" effect, appearing almost blackish-blue in incandescent light. Current photographs of the Hope Diamond use high-intensity light sources that tend to maximize the brilliance of gemstones. In popular literature, many superlatives have been used to describe the Hope Diamond as a "superfine deep blue," often comparing it to the color of a fine sapphire—for example, "blue of the most beautiful blue sapphire" (Deulafait)—and describing its color as "a sapphire blue." Tavernier described it as a "beautiful violet".
 * Phosphorescence: The stone exhibits an unusually intense, brilliant red phosphorescence after exposure to short-wave ultraviolet light. This 'glow-in-the-dark' effect persists for some time after the light source has been switched off, and this strange quality may have helped fuel its reputation of being "cursed." The red glow is a phenomenon of blue diamonds that helps scientists "fingerprint" them, allowing them to distinguish real ones from artificial ones. The red glow occurs because of a mix of boron and nitrogen in the stone.
 * Clarity: The clarity was determined to be VS1, with whitish graining present.
 * Cut: The cut was described as being "cushion antique brilliant with a faceted girdle and extra facets on the pavilion."
 * Chemical composition: In 2010, the diamond was removed from its setting to measure its chemical composition. After boring a hole one nanometer deep, preliminary experiments detected the presence of boron, hydrogen, and possibly nitrogen; the boron concentration varies from zero to eight parts per million. The boron is responsible for causing the blue color of the stone.
 * Touch and feel: When Associated Press reporter Ron Edmonds was allowed by Smithsonian officials to hold the gem in his hands in 2003, he wrote that the first thought that had come into his mind was, "Wow!" It was described as "cool to the touch." He wrote:

- Associated Press reporter Ron Edmonds in 2003

 * Hardness: Diamonds in general, including the Hope Diamond, are the hardest natural minerals known on Earth, but, because of weak planes in the bonds of a diamond's crystalline structure, the crystal can fracture along these planes if not handled correctly. These weak planes allow diamond cutters to split a rough uncut stone into smaller flawless parts before the process of faceting the stone takes place. Only a diamond can scratch another diamond, so, to create a faceted diamond, the uncut rough is mounted in a holder, and then the flat surfaces or facets are ground into the surface of the stone using specially made metal wheels impregnated with diamond particles. These facets are ground and polished using ever finer grades/grits of diamond powder until they have a clear mirror surface, ultimately producing a gem that sparkles by refracting and reflecting light in different ways.

Geological beginnings
The Hope Diamond was formed deep within the Earth approximately 1.1 billion years ago. Like all diamonds, it was formed when carbon atoms formed strong bonds with each other. The Hope Diamond was originally embedded in kimberlite and was later extracted and refined to form the current gem. The Hope Diamond contains trace amounts of boron atoms intermixed with the carbon structure, which results in the rare blue color of the diamond.

"People typically think of the Hope Diamond as a historic gem, but... it's [important] as a rare scientific specimen that can provide vital insights into our knowledge of diamonds and how they are formed in the earth."

- Jeffrey Post, Smithsonian curator, 2008

India
Several accounts, based on remarks written by French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who obtained the gem in India in 1666, suggest that the gemstone originated in India, in the Kollur mine in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh (which, at the time, was part of the Golconda kingdom), in the seventeenth century.

Tavernier's book, the Six Voyages (French: Les Six Voyages de J. B. Tavernier), contains sketches of several large diamonds that he sold to King Louis XIV, possibly in 1668 or 1669; a blue diamond is shown among these, and Tavernier mentions the mines at "Gani Coulour" (Kollur Mine) as a source of colored diamonds, but no direct mention of the stone is made. Historian Richard Kurin has built a highly speculative case for 1653 as the year of acquisition, but the most that can be said with certainty is that Tavernier obtained the blue diamond during one of his five voyages to India between the years 1640 and 1667. One report suggests he took 25 diamonds to Paris, including the large rock which became the Hope, and sold all of them to King Louis XIV. Another report suggested that in 1669, Tavernier sold this large blue diamond along with approximately one thousand other diamonds to King Louis XIV for 220,000 livres—the equivalent of 147 kilograms of pure gold.

In the historical novel, The French Blue, gemologist and historian Richard W. Wise proposes that the patent of nobility granted to Tavernier by Louis XIV was part of the payment for the Tavernier Blue. According to the theory, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (the King's Finance Minister at the time) regularly sold noble offices and titles for cash; an outright patent of nobility, according to Wise, was worth approximately 500,000 livres. That amount, plus the reported sale to the King, would have totaled about 720,000 livres, half the price of Tavernier's initial estimate for the gem. There has been controversy regarding the actual weight of the stone: Morel believed that the 112.1875 carat stated in Tavernier's invoice would be in old French carats, thus 115.28 metric carats.

France

In 1678, Louis XIV commissioned the court jeweler Jean Pitau to recut the Tavernier Blue, resulting in a 67.125 carat stone which royal inventories thereafter listed as the Blue Diamond of the Crown of France (diamant bleu de la Couronne de France ). Later English-speaking historians have simply called it the French Blue. The king had the stone set on a cravat-pin.

According to one report, Louis ordered Pitau to "make him a piece to remember", and Pitau worked for two years, resulting in a "triangular-shaped 69 carat gem the size of a pigeon's egg that took the breath away as it snared the light, reflecting it back in bluish-grey rays." It was set in gold and was supported by a ribbon for the neck which was worn by the king during ceremonies.

"At the diamond's dazzling heart was a sun with seven facets—the sun being Louis' emblem, and seven being a number rich in meaning in biblical cosmology, indicating divinity and spirituality."

- report by Agence France-Presse, 2008

In 1749, Louis XIV's great-grandson, Louis XV, had the French Blue set into a more elaborate jeweled pendant for the Order of the Golden Fleece by court jeweler André Jacquemin. The assembled piece included a red spinel of 107 carat carats shaped as a dragon breathing "covetous flames," as well as 83 red-painted diamonds and 112 yellow-painted diamonds to suggest a fleece shape.

The piece fell into disuse after the death of Louis XV. The diamond became the property of his grandson Louis XVI. whose wife, queen Marie Antoinette, used many of the French Crown Jewels for personal adornment by having the individual gems placed in new settings and combinations, but the French Blue remained in this pendant (except for a brief time in 1787, when the stone was removed for scientific study by Mathurin Jacques Brisson).

Theft and disappearance
On September 11, 1792, while Louis XVI and his family were imprisoned in the Square du Temple during the early stages of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, a group of thieves broke into the Royal Storehouse—the Hôtel du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne (now Hôtel de la Marine)—stealing most of the Crown Jewels in a five-day looting spree. While many jewels were later recovered, including other pieces of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the French Blue was not among them and it disappeared from history.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined; Marie Antoinette was guillotined on October 16 of the same year. These beheadings are commonly cited as a result of the diamond's "curse," but the historical record suggests that Marie Antoinette had never worn the Golden Fleece pendant because it had been reserved for the exclusive use of the King.

A likely scenario is that the French Blue, sometimes also known as the Blue Diamond, was "swiftly smuggled to London" after being seized in 1792 in Paris. But, the exact rock known as the French Blue was never seen again, since it almost certainly was recut during this decades-long period of anonymity, with the largest remaining piece becoming the Hope Diamond. One report suggested that the cut was a "butchered job" because it sheared off 23.5 carat from the larger rock as well as hurting its "extraordinary luster."

It was long believed that the Hope Diamond was cut from the French Blue, but confirmation came when a three-dimensional leaden model of the latter was rediscovered in the archives of the Paris National Museum of Natural History in 2005. Previously, the dimensions of the French Blue had been known only from two drawings made in 1749 and 1789; although the model differs slightly from the drawings in some details, these details are identical to features of the Hope Diamond, allowing CAD technology to digitally reconstruct the French Blue around the recut stone.

The leaden model revealed 20 unknown facets on the back of the French Blue. It also confirmed the diamond underwent a rather rough recut that removed the three points and reduced the thickness by a few millimeters. The Sun King's blue diamond became unrecognizable and the baroque style of the original cut was definitely lost.

Historians suggested that one burglar, Cadet Guillot, took several jewels, including the French Blue and the Côte-de-Bretagne spinel, to Le Havre and then to London, where the French Blue was cut in two pieces.

Morel adds that in 1796, Guillot attempted to resell the Côte-de-Bretagne in France but was forced to relinquish it to fellow thief Lancry de la Loyelle, who put Guillot into debtors' prison.

In a contrasting report, historian Richard Kurin speculated that the "theft" of the French Crown Jewels was in fact engineered by the revolutionary leader Georges Danton as part of a plan to bribe an opposing military commander, Duke Karl Wilhelm of Brunswick. When under attack by Napoleon in 1805, Karl Wilhelm may have had the French Blue recut to disguise its identity; in this form, the stone could have come to Great Britain in 1806, when his family fled there to join his daughter Caroline of Brunswick. Although Caroline was the wife of the Prince Regent (later George IV of the United Kingdom), she lived apart from her husband, and financial straits sometimes forced her to quietly sell her own jewels to support her household. Caroline's nephew, Duke Karl Friedrich, was later known to possess a 13.75 carat blue diamond which was widely thought to be another piece of the French Blue.

This smaller diamond's present whereabouts are unknown, and the recent CAD reconstruction of the French Blue fits too tightly around the Hope Diamond to allow for the existence of a sister stone of that size.

The United Kingdom
A blue diamond with the same shape, size, and color as the Hope Diamond was recorded by John Francillon as in the possession of the London diamond merchant Daniel Eliason in September 1812, the earliest point when the history of the Hope Diamond can be definitively fixed, although a second, less definitive report claims that the Hope Diamond's "authentic history" can only be traced back to 1830. The jewel was a "massive blue stone of 45.54 carat" and weighed 177 gr (4 gr = 1 carat). The 1812 date was just days after 20 years since the theft of the French Blue, just as the statute of limitations for the crime had taken effect.

While the diamond had disappeared for two decades, there were questions whether this diamond now in Great Britain was exactly the same one as had belonged to the French kings. Scientific investigation in 2008 confirmed "beyond reasonable doubt" that the Hope Diamond and that owned by the kings of France were, indeed, the same gemstone.

There are conflicting reports about what happened to the diamond during these years. Eliason's diamond may have been acquired by George IV of the United Kingdom, possibly through Caroline of Brunswick; however, there is no record of the ownership in the Royal Archives at Windsor, although some secondary evidence exists in the form of contemporary writings and artwork, and George IV tended to mix up the Crown property of the Crown jewels with family heirlooms and his own personal property.

A source at the Smithsonian suggested there were "several references" suggesting that George had indeed owned the diamond. After his death in 1830, it has been alleged that some of this mixed collection was stolen by George's last mistress, Elizabeth Conyngham, and some of his personal effects were discreetly liquidated to cover the many debts he had left behind him. Another report states that the king's debts were "so enormous" that the diamond was probably sold through "private channels". In either case, the blue diamond was not retained by the British royal family.

The stone was later reported to have been acquired by a rich London banker named Thomas Hope, for either $65,000 or $90,000. It has been suggested that Eliason may have been a "front" for Hope, acting not as a diamond merchant venturing money on his own account, but rather as an agent to acquire the diamond for the banker. In 1839, the Hope Diamond appeared in a published catalog of the gem collection of his brother Henry Philip Hope, members of the Anglo-Dutch banking family Hope & Co.

The stone was set in a fairly simple medallion surrounded by many smaller white diamonds, which he sometimes lent to Louisa de la Poer Beresford, the widow of his brother, Thomas Hope, for society balls. After falling into the ownership of the Hope family, the stone came to be known as the "Hope Diamond".

Henry Philip Hope died in 1839, the same year as the publication of his collection catalog. His three nephews, the sons of Thomas and Louisa, fought in court for ten years over his inheritance, and ultimately the collection was split up. The oldest nephew, Henry Thomas Hope, received eight of the most valuable gems, including the Hope Diamond. It was displayed in the Great Exhibition of London in 1851 and at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, but was usually kept in a bank vault. In 1861, Henry Thomas Hope's only child, Henrietta, married Henry Pelham-Clinton (and later Duke of Newcastle).

When Hope died on December 4, 1862, his wife Anne Adele inherited the gem, but she feared that the profligate lifestyle of her son-in-law might cause him to sell the Hope properties. Upon Adele's death in 1884, the entire Hope estate, including the Hope Diamond, was entrusted to Henrietta's younger son, Henry Francis Pelham-Clinton, on the condition that he add the name of "Hope" to his own surnames when he reached the age of legal majority.

As Lord Francis Hope, this grandson received his legacy in 1887. However, he had only a life interest in his inheritance, meaning that he could not sell any part of it without court permission.

In 1894, Lord Francis Hope met the American concert hall singer May Yohé, who has been described as "the sensation of two continents", and they were married the same year; one account suggests that Yohé wore the Hope Diamond on at least one occasion.

She later claimed that she had worn it at social gatherings and had an exact replica made for her performances, but her husband claimed otherwise. Lord Francis lived beyond his means, and this eventually caught up with him, leading to marriage troubles and financial reverses, and he found that he had to sell the diamond.

In 1896, his bankruptcy was discharged, but, as he could not sell the Hope Diamond without the court's permission, he was supported financially by his wife during these intervening years. In 1901, the financial situation had changed, and after a "long legal fight," he was given permission to sell the Hope Diamond by an order of the Master in Chancery to "pay off debts". But May Yohé ran off with a gentleman friend named Putnam Strong, who was a son of the former New York City mayor William L. Strong. Francis Hope and May Yohé were divorced in 1902.

Francis sold the diamond for £29,000 (£0 million today), to Adolph Weil, a London jewel merchant. Weil sold the stone in 1901 to the diamond dealer Simon Frankel, based in New York and/or London who took it to New York. One report stated that he had paid $250,000 ($ million today). However, in New York it was evaluated to be worth $141,032 ($ million today).

The United States (1902–present)
Accounts vary about what happened to the diamond during the years 1902–1907; one account suggested that it lay in the William & Theodore safe during these years while the jewelers took it out periodically to show it to wealthy Americans; a rival account, probably invented to help add "mystery" to the Hope Diamond story, suggested that some persons had bought it but apparently sold it back to Frankel. There were reports in one story in The New York Times of several owners of the gem, perhaps who had bought it from Frankel and owned it temporarily who met with ill-fortune, but this report conflicts with the more likely possibility that the gem remained in the hands of the Frankel jewelry firm during these years. Like many jewelry firms, the Frankel business ran into financial difficulties during the depression of 1907 and referred to the gem as the "hoodoo diamond."

In 1908, Frankel sold the diamond for $400,000 ($ million today) to a Salomon or Selim Habib, a wealthy Turkish diamond collector, reportedly on behalf of Sultan Abdulhamid of Ottoman Empire; however, on June 24, 1909, the stone was included in an auction of Habib's assets to settle his own debts, and the auction catalog explicitly stated that the Hope Diamond was one of only two gems in the collection which had never been owned by the Sultan. A contrary report, however, suggested that Sultan Abdul Hamid did own the gem but ordered Habib to sell it when his throne "began to totter." Habib reportedly sold the stone in Paris in 1909 for $80,000 ($ million today). The Parisian jewel merchant Simon Rosenau bought the Hope Diamond for 400,000 francs and resold it in 1910 to Pierre Cartier for 550,000 francs. In 1910, it was offered for $150,000 ($ million today), according to one report.

Pierre Cartier tried to sell the Hope Diamond to Washington, D.C., socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean and her husband in 1910. Cartier was a consummate salesman who used an understated presentation to entice Mrs. McLean. He described the gem's illustrious history to her while keeping it concealed underneath special wrapping paper. The suspense worked: McLean became impatient to the point where she suddenly requested to see the stone. She recalled later that Cartier "held before our eyes the Hope Diamond." Nevertheless, she initially rejected the offer. Cartier had it reset. She found the stone much more appealing in this new modern style. There were conflicting reports about the sale in The New York Times; one account suggested that the young McLean couple had agreed to purchase the diamond, but after having learned about its unfortunate supposed history, the couple had wanted to back out of the deal since they knew nothing of the "history of misfortunes that have beset its various owners." "Both Ned McLean and his pretty wife are quite young, and in a way unsophisticated, although they were born and reared in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury. All their lives they have known more of jewelry, finery, banquets, automobiles, horses, and other articles of pleasure than they have of books, with their wealth of knowledge."

- report in The New York Times, March 1911

The brouhaha over the diamond's supposed "ill luck" prompted a worried editor of The Jewelers' Circular-Weekly to write: "No mention of any ill luck having befallen Eliason, Hope, or any of their descendants was ever made. The Frankels surely were very prosperous while the stone was in their possession, as were the dealers who held it in Europe. Habib's misfortune referred to in the newspaper accounts occurred long after he had sold the stone... As Francis Hope never had the stone and May Yohe probably never saw it ... the newspaper accounts at the time mentioned were laughed at, but since then it has been the custom not only to revive these stories every time mention of the stone appears in the public press, but to add to them fictitious incidents of misfortune as to alleged possessors of the stone at various times."

- T. Edgar Willson, in an editorial in The New York Times, 1911

The tenuous deal involved wrangling among attorneys for both Cartier and the McLeans, but finally, in 1911, the couple bought the gem for over $300,000 (over $ million today), although there are differing estimates of the sales price at $150,000 and $180,000. An alternative scenario is that the McLeans may have fabricated concern about the supposed "curse" to generate publicity to increase the value of their investment.

A description was that the gemstone "lay on a bed of white silk and surrounded by many small white diamonds cut pear shaped". The new setting was the current platinum framework surrounded by a row of sixteen diamonds which alternated between Old Mine Cut and pear-shaped variants. Mrs. McLean wore it to a "brilliant reception" in February 1912 when it was reported that it was the first time it had been worn in public since it had "changed owners." She would "sport the diamond at social events" and wore it to numerous social occasions that she had organized. "The Hope Diamond in its original pendant must have looked fantastic at parties circa the 1920s, when it hung around the neck of owner Evalyn Walsh McLean's Great Dane, Mike."

- report in The Wall Street Journal, 2010

There were reports that she misplaced it at parties, deliberately and frequently, and then make a children's game out of "finding the Hope", and times when she hid the diamond somewhere on her estate during the "lavish parties she threw and invite guests to find it." The stone prompted elaborate security precautions:

"William Schindele, a former Secret Service man, has been engaged to guard the stone. He in turn will be guarded by Leo Costello and Simeon Blake, private detectives. The stone will be kept at the McLean mansion during the day and each night will be deposited in a safe deposit vault. When Mrs. McLean wears the gem at balls and receptions arrangements have been made to keep the safe deposit building open until after the function that the stone may be safely stored away. A special automobile has been purchased to convey the guards to and from the house to the trust company's building."

- report in The New York Times, 1911

But the stone was not stolen during their ownership. When Mrs. McLean died in 1947, she bequeathed the diamond to her grandchildren through a will which insisted that her former property would remain in the custody of trustees until the eldest child had reached 25 years of age. This requirement would have prevented any sale for the next two decades. However, the trustees gained permission to sell her jewels to settle her debts, and in 1949 sold them to New York diamond merchant Harry Winston. He purchased McLean's "entire jewelry collection". Over the next decade, Winston exhibited McLean's necklace in his "Court of Jewels," a tour of jewels around the United States, as well as various promotional events and charity balls. The diamond appeared on the television quiz show The Name's the Same, in an episode which first aired on August 16, 1955, when a teenaged contestant with the actual name Hope Diamond was one of the mystery guests, as well as at the August 1958 Canadian National Exhibition. At some point, Winston also had the Hope Diamond's bottom facet slightly recut to increase its brilliance.

Smithsonian ownership
Smithsonian mineralogist George Switzer is credited with persuading jeweler Harry Winston to donate the Hope Diamond for a proposed national gem collection to be housed at the National Museum of Natural History. On November 10, 1958, Winston acquiesced, sending it through U.S. Mail in a box wrapped in brown paper as simple registered mail insured for $1 million at a cost of $145.29, of which $2.44 was for postage and the balance insurance. Upon its arrival it became Specimen #217868.

Winston had never believed in any of the tales about the curse; he donated the diamond with the hope that it would help the United States "establish a gem collection."

Winston died many years later, in 1978, of a heart attack. Winston's gift, according to Smithsonian curator Dr. Jeffrey Post, indeed helped spur additional gifts to the museum.

For its first four decades in the National Museum of Natural History, the Hope Diamond lay in its necklace inside a glass-fronted safe as part of the gems and jewelry gallery, except for a few brief excursions: a 1962 exhibition to the Louvre; the 1965 Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg, South Africa; and two visits back to Harry Winston's premises in New York City, once in 1984, and once for a 50th anniversary celebration in 1996.

To guard against theft during the diamond's trip to the 1962 Louvre exhibition, Switzer traveled to Paris with the Hope Diamond tucked inside a velvet pouch sewn by his wife. The Hope Diamond was placed into the pouch, which was pinned inside Switzer's pants pocket for the flight.

When the Smithsonian's gallery was renovated in 1997, the necklace was moved onto a rotating pedestal inside a cylinder made of 3 in thick bulletproof glass in its own display room, adjacent to the main exhibit of the National Gem Collection, in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals. The Hope Diamond is the most popular jewel on display and the collection's centerpiece.

In 1988, specialists with the Gemological Institute of America graded it and noticed "evidence of wear" and its "remarkably strong phosphorescence" with its clarity "slightly affected by a whitish graining which is common to blue diamonds." A highly sensitive colorimeter found tiny traces of a "very slight violet component" which is imperceptible to normal vision.

In 2005, the Smithsonian published a year-long computer-aided geometry research which officially acknowledged that the Hope Diamond is, in fact, cut from the stolen French Blue crown jewel.

In 2009, the Smithsonian announced a temporary new setting for the jewel to celebrate a half-century at the National Museum of Natural History. Starting in September 2009 it was exhibited as a stand-alone gem with no setting. It had been removed from its setting for cleaning from time to time, but this was the first time it would be on public display by itself. Previously it had been shown in a platinum setting, surrounded by 16 white pear-shaped and cushion-cut diamonds, suspended from a chain containing forty-five diamonds.

The Hope returned to its traditional setting in late 2010.

On November 18, 2010, the Hope Diamond was unveiled and displayed at the Smithsonian in a temporary newly designed necklace called "Embracing Hope", created by the Harry Winston firm. Three designs for the new setting, all white diamonds and white metal, were created and the public voted on the final version.

The Hope Diamond also is resting on a new dark blue neck form, which the Harry Winston firm commissioned from display organization, Pac Team Group. Previously, the Hope Diamond had been displayed as a loose gem since late summer of 2009 when it was removed from its former Cartier-designed setting. A Smithsonian curator described it as "priceless" because it was "irreplaceable", although it was reported to be insured for $250 million.

On January 13, 2012, the diamond was returned to its historic setting, and the current necklace was implanted with another diamond worth "at least a million dollars". The necklace with the new diamond will be sold to benefit the Smithsonian.

Superstitions, publicity, marketing
The diamond has been surrounded by a mythology of a reputed "curse" to the effect that it brings misfortune and tragedy to anyone who owns it or wears it, but there are strong indications that such fabrications enhance the stone's mystery and appeal, since increased publicity usually raised the gem's value and newsworthiness.

According to many specious accounts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the original form of the Hope Diamond was stolen from an eye of a sculpted statue of the Hindu goddess Sita. However, much like the "curse of Tutankhamun", this general type of "legend" was most likely the independent creation of Western authors during the Victorian era, and the specific legends about the Hope Diamond's "cursed origin" were invented in the early 20th century to add mystique to the stone and increase its sales appeal as well as increase newspaper sales.

It fueled speculation that persons possessing the gemstone were fated to have bad luck with varying reports of undetermined veracity. A report in 2006 in The New York Times, however, suggested that "any hard evidence linking it to tragedy has yet to be officially proven."

There is evidence of several newspaper accounts which helped spread the "curse" story. A New Zealand newspaper article in 1888 described the supposedly lurid history of the Hope Diamond, including a claim that it was "said once to have formed the single eye of a great idol", as part of a confused description that also claimed that its namesake owner had personally "brought it from India", and that the diamond's true color was "white, [although] when held to the light, it emits the most superb and dazzling blue rays."

An article entitled "Hope Diamond Has Brought Trouble To All Who Have Owned It" appeared in The Washington Post in 1908. In 1909 upon reporting on the sale of the Hope Diamond The Times also gave an account of its history, noting "its possession is the story of a long series of tragedies - murder, suicide, madness, and various other misfortunes."

These were followed by another New York Times article in 1911 which gave a list of supposed cases of ill-fortune, but with few confirmations from other sources:
 * Jacques Colet bought the Hope Diamond from Simon Frankel and committed suicide.
 * Prince Ivan Kanitovski bought it from Colet but was killed by Russian revolutionists.
 * Kanitovski loaned it to Mlle Ladue who was "murdered by her sweetheart."
 * Simon Mencharides, who had once sold it to the Turkish sultan, was thrown from a precipice along with his wife and young child.
 * Sultan Hamid gave it to Abu Sabir to "polish" but later Sabir was imprisoned and tortured.
 * Stone guardian Kulub Bey was hanged by a mob in Turkey.
 * A Turkish attendant named Hehver Agha was hanged for having it in his possession.
 * Tavernier, who brought the stone from India to Paris was "torn to pieces by wild dogs in Constantinople."
 * King Louis XIV gave it to Madame de Montespan whom later he abandoned.
 * Nicholas Fouquet, an "Intendant of France", borrowed it temporarily to wear it but was "disgraced and died in prison."
 * A temporary wearer, Princess de Lamballe, was "torn to pieces by a French mob."
 * Jeweler William Fals who recut the stone "died a ruined man."
 * William Fals' son Hendrik stole the jewel from his father and later died by suicide.
 * Some years (after Hendrik) "it was sold to Francis Deaulieu, who died in misery and want."

The mainstream view is that these accounts are specious and speculative since there are few, if any, independent confirmations to back them up. A few months later, perhaps compounded by inaccurate reports in The New York Times on November 17, 1909, it was incorrectly reported that the diamond's former owner, Selim Habib, had drowned in a shipwreck of the steamer Seyne near Singapore; in fact, it was a different person with the same name, not the owner of the diamond. There was speculation that jeweler Pierre Cartier further embroidered the lurid tales to intrigue Evalyn Walsh McLean into buying the Hope Diamond in 1911.

The theme of greedy robbers stealing a valuable object from the tomb or shrine of an ancient god or ruler, and then being punished by it, is one which repeats in many different forms of literature. A likely source of inspiration for the fabrications was the Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel, The Moonstone, which created a coherent narrative from vague and largely disregarded legends which had been attached to other diamonds such as the Koh-i-Noor and the Orloff diamond. The theme can be seen in films such as The Mummy as well as stories about the curse of Egyptian king Tutankhamun and in more recent films such as the Indiana Jones films. In keeping with these scripts, according to the legend, Tavernier did not buy the Hope diamond but stole it from a Hindu temple where it had been set as one of two matching eyes of an idol, and the temple priests then laid a curse on whoever might possess the missing stone. Largely because the other blue diamond "eye" never surfaced, historians dismissed the fantastical story.

The stories generally do not bear up to more pointed examination; for example, the legend that Tavernier's body was "torn apart by wolves" is inconsistent with historical evidence which shows that he lived to 84 and died of natural causes.

It is possible that the overblown story of the "curse", possibly fueled by Cartier and others, may have caused some hesitation on the part of the prospective buyers, the McLeans, around 1911. When a lawsuit between buyer and seller erupted about the terms of the deal, newspapers kept alive reports of the diamond's "malevolent influence" with reports like this one, which blamed the stone's "curse" on having caused, of all things, the lawsuit itself:

"The malevolent influence that has for centuries dogged with discord and disaster the owners of the famous Hope diamond has started again and without waste of time, despite special precautions against ill-luck taken at the time of its last sale, according to John S. Wise, Jr., of 20 Broad Street, attorney for Cartiers, the Fifth Avenue jewelers, who are suing Mr. and Mrs. Edward B. McLean for $180,000, its alleged purchase price."

- report in The New York Times, March 1911

The Hope Diamond was also blamed for the unhappy fates of other historical figures vaguely linked to its ownership, such as the falls of Madame Athenais de Montespan and French finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, during the reign of Louis XIV of France; the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the rape and mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe during the French Revolution; and the forced abdication of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid who had supposedly killed various members of his court for the stone (despite the annotation in Habib's auction catalog). Even jewelers who may have handled the Hope Diamond were not spared from its reputed malice: the insanity and suicide of Jacques Colot, who supposedly bought it from Eliason, and the financial ruin of the jeweler Simon Frankel, who bought it from the Hope family, were linked to the stone. But although he is documented as a French diamond dealer of the correct era, Colot has no recorded connection with the stone, and Frankel's misfortunes were in the midst of economic straits that also ruined many of his peers.

The legend includes deaths of numerous other characters who had been previously unknown: Diamond cutter Wilhelm Fals, killed by his son Hendrik, who stole it and later committed suicide; Francois Beaulieu, who received the stone from Hendrik but starved to death after selling it to Eliason; a Russian prince named Kanitowski, who lent it to French actress Lorens Ladue and promptly shot her dead on the stage, and was himself stabbed to death by revolutionaries; Simon Montharides, hurled over a precipice with his family. However, the existence of only a few of these characters has been verified historically, leading researchers to conclude that most of these persons are fictitious.

The actress May Yohe made repeated attempts to capitalize on her identity as the former wife of the last Hope to own the diamond, and sometimes blamed the gemstone for her misfortunes. In July 1902, months after Lord Francis divorced her, she told police in Australia that her lover, Putnam Strong, had abandoned her and taken her jewels. In fact, the couple reconciled, married later that year, but divorced in 1910. On her third marriage in 1920, she persuaded film producer George Kleine to back a 15-episode serial The Hope Diamond Mystery, which added fictitious characters to the tale, but the project was not successful. In 1921, she hired Henry Leyford Gates to help her write The Mystery of the Hope Diamond, in which she starred as Lady Francis Hope. The film added more characters, including a fictionalized Tavernier, and added Marat among the diamond's "victims". She also wore her copy of the Hope, trying to generate more publicity to further her career.

Evalyn Walsh McLean added her own narrative to the story behind the blue jewel, including that one of the owners had been Catherine the Great, although there are no confirmations that the Russian ruler ever owned the diamond. McLean would bring the Diamond out for friends to try on, including Warren G. Harding and Florence Harding.

Since the Smithsonian acquired the gemstone, the "curse appears to have gone dormant." Owning the diamond has brought "nothing but good luck" for the nonprofit national museum, according to a Smithsonian curator, and has helped it build a "world-class gem collection" with rising attendance levels.

Replicas
In 2007, a lead cast of the French Blue diamond was discovered in the gemological collections of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This triggered an investigation by an international team of researchers into the stone's history, which previously had to rely on two-dimensional sketches of the diamond. The three-dimensional structure allowed researchers to apply techniques such as computer-aided drawing analysis.

The methods for digitally-reconstructing the gem are reviewed in this article's "Theft and Disappearance" section. The emblem of the Golden Fleece of Louis XV was reconstructed around the French Blue, including the "Côte de Bretagne" spinel of 107 carat, the "Bazu" diamond of 32.62 carat, 3 oriental topazes (yellow sapphires), five brilliants of up to 5 carat and nearly 300 smaller diamonds.

As part of the investigation, the "Tavernier Blue" diamond was reconstructed from the original French edition of Tavernier's Voyages (rather than the later London edition, which had distorted and modified Tavernier's original figures). The Smithsonian Institution provided ray-tracing and optical spectroscopic data about the Hope diamond.

The lead cast had been catalogued at the French museum in 1850 and was provided by a prominent Parisian jeweler named Charles Archard who lived during the same generation as René Just Haüy, who died in 1822. Most likely, the lead cast was made near 1815, because that was the year that similar entries from the 1850 catalogue had been made. The model was accompanied by a label stating that the French Blue was in the possession of a person known as "Mr. Hope of London". Other archives at the Muséum suggests that Hope was a customer of Achard for many years, particularly for blue gems.

These findings have helped investigators piece together what may have happened during the rock's anonymous years during the several decades following 1792. According to one line of reasoning, the first "Hope" to have the "Hope Diamond"—Henry Phillip Hope—might have possessed the French Blue that he had acquired some time after the 1792 robbery in Paris, perhaps around 1794–1795, when the Hopes were believed to have left Holland for London to escape Napoleon's armies. At about the same time, Cadet Guillot, who may have been one of the thieves to have stolen the Golden Fleece, arrived in London. This places Mr. Hope and Mr. Guillot in London at the same time. According to a late nineteenth century historian named Bapts, a contract was made between Cadet Guillot and a French aristocrat named Lancry de la Loyelle, in 1796, to sell the 107 carat spinel-dragon of the Golden Fleece. According to this line of reasoning, in 1802 Hope sold his assets, and the continental blockade by Napoleon led the Hope's bank into a serious financial crisis by 1808, and the crisis peaked during the winter of 1811–1812 This put Mr. Hope in a financial bind. There is a possibility that, given his financial predicament, Hope pawned the French Blue to jewel merchant Eliason to get much-needed cash when the British currency, sterling, was highly depreciated. This is consistent with the entry in Eliason's records about having the stone in 1812.

However, the diamond's owners may have felt pressure to recut the stone quickly to disguise its identity, since if the French government had learned of its existence, it may have sued the owners for repossession. Regardless of whether Mr. Hope had lost possession or kept it during these years, by 1824 it was again in his possession. It was around this time that Eliason died; Hope's financial situation had been restored thanks to efforts by the Barings, who saved the Hope bank in the difficult financial years of 1812–1820. Accordingly, if this is correct, then the lead cast of the French Blue and the "Hope" diamond are likely to have been created in the same workshop, possibly in London, and probably a little before 1812.

The lead cast had important ramifications since it gave enough information to curators at the French museum to commission the first exact replicas of both the Tavernier and French Blue diamonds using a material which simulates diamonds called cubic zirconia, with the help of artisans who work with gems (lapidaries), led by Scott Sucher. These replicas have been completed and displayed with the French Crown Jewels and the Great Sapphire of Louis XIV, a Moghul-cut sapphire of 135.7 carat. Artisans recreated the elaborate parure of different-colored gems known as the Golden Fleece of King Louis XV of France, which is arguably the most fabulous work in the history of French jewelry; this happened from 2007 to 2010. The original parure, created in 1749 by royal jeweler Pierre-André Jacquemin, was stolen and broken in 1792. The reassembled jewel contained the French Blue and the Bazu diamonds, as well as the Côte de Bretagne spinel and hundreds of smaller diamonds. Three years of work were needed to recreate this jewel, and it required exacting and precise skill which revealed not only the skill of today's lapidaries, but the skill of its original eighteenth-century designers. The reconstructed jewel was presented by Herbert Horovitz, with of the French museum in attendance, at the former Royal Storehouse in Paris on June 30, 2010, which was the same site where the original had been stolen 218 years before.

Additional recreations were made possible by new discoveries. A previously unknown drawing of the Golden Fleece was rediscovered in Switzerland in the 1980s, and two blue diamonds that had ornamented the jewel were found as well, and these recent findings enabled artisans to recreate a copy of the emblem. It led to the construction, using cubic zirconia, of a piece that almost exactly resembles the mythic French Blue 69 carat masterpiece.

The emblem has another great blue diamond, which was later named "the Bazu" in reference to a dealer who reportedly had sold it to Louis XIV in 1669. This Bazu diamond was recut in 1749 as a baroque cushion weighing 32.62 carat. The 1791 inventory mentioned that the Bazu was "light sky blue", which is consistent with the fact that the Golden Fleece of the Color Adornment was made of a variety of great colored gems. Based on documents kept in a private collection, it could be shown that this particular diamond was not hexagonal-shaped, as some historians had previously thought, but was in a shape best described as "rounded squared", similar to the so-called Régent diamond. There is a report that a curator from the French museum will assert that the hexagonal cut from the Bazu is inconsistent historically and gemologically. The Bazu stone referred to another version of Louis XV's great Golden Fleece, made out of blue sapphires instead of blue diamonds. According to one view, this version appears to have never been manufactured but only suggested to the king as an alternative to the effective final version, bearing two blue diamonds. Nevertheless, replicas of both blue diamonds were cut by Scott Sucher using cubic zirconia, one being colored deep blue and the other light blue.

The emblem had a third great gem known as The Côte de Bretagne dragon. Its replica was based on a wax likeness sculpted by Pascal Monney, who had based his recreation from three-dimensional scaled pictures of the original object which had been made by French artist François Farges; Farges, in turn, had seen the original objects displayed at the Louvre's Galerie d'Apollon. In addition, artist Etienne Leperlier cast a "crystal" lead glass duplicate of the wax replica of the carved Côte de Bretagne. Its pigmentation is made out of gold and manganese pigments to simulate as close as possible the original color of the spinel.

The 500-plus remaining replicas of diamonds were cut from cubic zirconia using a baroque cushion cut. Colors were used to recall the original artwork: red for the flames, and yellow for the fleece, and in keeping with the original work, the materials used were initially colorless but were painted in the same fashion used by the artist Jacquemin when the original Golden Fleece was completed in 1749. Since the original was most likely made out of gold plated with silver, a choice was made to use a matrix mostly made out of 925-grade silver to keep costs under control without compromising quality. A number of different artists helped with this project:
 * The silver matrix was carved by Jean Minassian of Geneva who used historical drawings of the delicate three-dimensional elements of the dragon's wings and tail as well as the palms around which the dragon is suspended.
 * Casts were made by Andreas Altmann. This will allow even more copies to be made in the future.
 * Amico Bifulci gilded parts of the matrix to recreate the elegant original gold and silver arrangement of the original.

All stones were set according to 18th-century techniques. Finally, a luxury box containing the Golden Fleece was recreated by Frédéric Viollet using crimson-colored Moroccan leather. The box was gilded by Didier Montecot to the arms of Louis XV, using the king's original iron stamp made by the Simier house. A dark red cramoisi ribbon, made of crimson satin moire, holds the jewel inside the box.

title: Hope Diamond


text:
Henri Becquerel

Antoine Henri Becquerel (15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

Family and education
Becquerel was born in Paris, France, into a wealthy family which produced four generations of notable physicists, including Becquerel's grandfather (Antoine César Becquerel), father (Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel), and son (Jean Becquerel). Henri started off his education by attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand school, a prep school in Paris. He studied engineering at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

Career
In Becquerel's early career, he became the third in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1892. Later on in 1894, Becquerel became chief engineer in the Department of Bridges and Highways before he started with his early experiments. Becquerel's earliest works centered on the subject of his doctoral thesis: the plane polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and absorption of light by crystals. Early in his career, Becquerel also studied the Earth's magnetic fields. In 1895, he was appointed as a professor at the École Polytechnique.

Becquerel's discovery of spontaneous radioactivity is a famous example of serendipity, of how chance favors the prepared mind. Becquerel had long been interested in phosphorescence, the emission of light of one color following the object's exposure to light of another color. In early 1896, there was a wave of excitement following Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discovery of X-rays on 5 January. During the experiment, Röntgen "found that the Crookes tubes he had been using to study cathode rays emitted a new kind of invisible ray that was capable of penetrating through black paper". Becquerel learned of Röntgen's discovery during a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on 20 January where his colleague Henri Poincaré read out Röntgen's preprint paper. Becquerel "began looking for a connection between the phosphorescence he had already been investigating and the newly discovered x-rays" of Röntgen, and thought that phosphorescent materials might emit penetrating X-ray-like radiation when illuminated by bright sunlight; he had various phosphorescent materials including some uranium salts for his experiments.

Throughout the first weeks of February, Becquerel layered photographic plates with coins or other objects then wrapped this in thick black paper, placed phosphorescent materials on top, placed these in bright sun light for several hours. The developed plate showed shadows of the objects. Already on 24 February he reported his first results. However, the 26th and 27 February were dark and overcast during the day, so Becquerel left his layered plates in a dark cabinet for these days. He nevertheless proceeded to develop the plates on 1 March and then made his astonishing discovery: the object shadows were just as distinct when left in the dark as when exposed to sunlight. Both William Crookes and Becquerel's 18 year old son Jean witnessed the discovery.

By May 1896, after other experiments involving non-phosphorescent uranium salts, he arrived at the correct explanation, namely that the penetrating radiation came from the uranium itself, without any need for excitation by an external energy source. There followed a period of intense research into radioactivity, including the determination that the element thorium is also radioactive and the discovery of additional radioactive elements polonium and radium by Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie. The intensive research of radioactivity led to Becquerel publishing seven papers on the subject in 1896. Becquerel's other experiments allowed him to research more into radioactivity and figure out different aspects of the magnetic field when radiation is introduced into the magnetic field. "When different radioactive substances were put in the magnetic field, they deflected in different directions or not at all, showing that there were three classes of radioactivity: negative, positive, and electrically neutral."

As often happens in science, radioactivity came close to being discovered nearly four decades earlier in 1857, when Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, who was investigating photography under Michel Eugène Chevreul, observed that uranium salts emitted radiation that could darken photographic emulsions. By 1861, Niepce de Saint-Victor realized that uranium salts produce "a radiation that is invisible to our eyes". Niepce de Saint-Victor knew Edmond Becquerel, Henri Becquerel's father. In 1868, Edmond Becquerel published a book, La lumière: ses causes et ses effets (Light: Its causes and its effects). On page 50 of volume 2, Edmond noted that Niepce de Saint-Victor had observed that some objects that had been exposed to sunlight could expose photographic plates even in the dark. Niepce further noted that on the one hand, the effect was diminished if an obstruction were placed between a photographic plate and the object that had been exposed to the sun, but " … d'un autre côté, l'augmentation d'effet quand la surface insolée est couverte de substances facilement altérables à la lumière, comme le nitrate d'urane … " ( ... on the other hand, the increase in the effect when the surface exposed to the sun is covered with substances that are easily altered by light, such as uranium nitrate ... ).

Experiments

Describing them to the French Academy of Sciences on 27 February 1896, he said:

"One wraps a Lumière photographic plate with a bromide emulsion in two sheets of very thick black paper, such that the plate does not become clouded upon being exposed to the sun for a day. One places on the sheet of paper, on the outside, a slab of the phosphorescent substance, and one exposes the whole to the sun for several hours. When one then develops the photographic plate, one recognizes that the silhouette of the phosphorescent substance appears in black on the negative. If one places between the phosphorescent substance and the paper a piece of money or a metal screen pierced with a cut-out design, one sees the image of these objects appear on the negative ... One must conclude from these experiments that the phosphorescent substance in question emits rays which pass through the opaque paper and reduce silver salts."

But further experiments led him to doubt and then abandon this hypothesis. On 2 March 1896 he reported:

"I will insist particularly upon the following fact, which seems to me quite important and beyond the phenomena which one could expect to observe: The same crystalline crusts [of potassium uranyl sulfate], arranged the same way with respect to the photographic plates, in the same conditions and through the same screens, but sheltered from the excitation of incident rays and kept in darkness, still produce the same photographic images. Here is how I was led to make this observation: among the preceding experiments, some had been prepared on Wednesday the 26th and Thursday the 27th of February, and since the sun was out only intermittently on these days, I kept the apparatuses prepared and returned the cases to the darkness of a bureau drawer, leaving in place the crusts of the uranium salt. Since the sun did not come out in the following days, I developed the photographic plates on the 1st of March, expecting to find the images very weak. Instead the silhouettes appeared with great intensity ... One hypothesis which presents itself to the mind naturally enough would be to suppose that these rays, whose effects have a great similarity to the effects produced by the rays studied by M. Lenard and M. Röntgen, are invisible rays emitted by phosphorescence and persisting infinitely longer than the duration of the luminous rays emitted by these bodies. However, the present experiments, without being contrary to this hypothesis, do not warrant this conclusion. I hope that the experiments which I am pursuing at the moment will be able to bring some clarification to this new class of phenomena."

Late career
Later in his life in 1900, Becquerel measured the properties of beta particles, and he realized that they had the same measurements as high speed electrons leaving the nucleus. In 1901 Becquerel made the discovery that radioactivity could be used for medicine. Henri made this discovery when he left a piece of radium in his vest pocket and noticed that he had been burnt by it. This discovery led to the development of radiotherapy which is now used to treat cancer. In 1908 Becquerel was elected president of Académie des Sciences, but he died on 25 August 1908, at the age of 55, in Le Croisic, France. He died of a heart attack, but it was reported that "he had developed serious burns on his skin, likely from the handling of radioactive materials."

Honors and awards

In 1889, Becquerel became a member of the Académie des Sciences. In 1900, Becquerel won the Rumford Medal for his discovery of the radioactivity of uranium and he awarded the title of an Officer of the Legion of Honour. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities awarded him the Helmholtz Medal in 1901. In 1902, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1903, Henri shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Marie Curie for the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity. In 1905, he was awarded the Barnard Medal by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 1906, Henri was elected Vice Chairman of the academy, and in 1908, the year of his death, Becquerel was elected Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Sciences. During his lifetime, Becquerel was honored with membership into the Accademia dei Lincei and the Royal Academy of Berlin. Becquerel was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1908. Becquerel has been honored with being the namesake of many different scientific discoveries. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

There is a crater named Becquerel on the Moon and also a crater named Becquerel on Mars. The uranium-based mineral becquerelite was named after Henri. Minor planet 6914 Becquerel is named in his honor.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Henri Becquerel


text:
Digital audio

Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samples are taken 44,100 times per second, each with 16-bit sample depth. Digital audio is also the name for the entire technology of sound recording and reproduction using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of audio engineering, record production and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.

In a digital audio system, an analog electrical signal representing the sound is converted with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) into a digital signal, typically using pulse-code modulation (PCM). This digital signal can then be recorded, edited, modified, and copied using computers, audio playback machines, and other digital tools. For playback, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) performs the reverse process, converting a digital signal back into an analog signal, which is then sent through an audio power amplifier and ultimately to a loudspeaker.

Digital audio systems may include compression, storage, processing, and transmission components. Conversion to a digital format allows convenient manipulation, storage, transmission, and retrieval of an audio signal. Unlike analog audio, in which making copies of a recording results in generation loss and degradation of signal quality, digital audio allows an infinite number of copies to be made without any degradation of signal quality.

Overview

Digital audio technologies are used in the recording, manipulation, mass-production, and distribution of sound, including recordings of songs, instrumental pieces, podcasts, sound effects, and other sounds. Modern online music distribution depends on digital recording and data compression. The availability of music as data files, rather than as physical objects, has significantly reduced the costs of distribution as well as made it easier to share copies. Before digital audio, the music industry distributed and sold music by selling physical copies in the form of records and cassette tapes. With digital audio and online distribution systems such as iTunes, companies sell digital sound files to consumers, which the consumer receives over the Internet. Popular streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube, offer temporary access to the digital file, and are now the most common form of music consumption.

An analog audio system converts physical waveforms of sound into electrical representations of those waveforms by use of a transducer, such as a microphone. The sounds are then stored on an analog medium such as magnetic tape, or transmitted through an analog medium such as a telephone line or radio. The process is reversed for reproduction: the electrical audio signal is amplified and then converted back into physical waveforms via a loudspeaker. Analog audio retains its fundamental wave-like characteristics throughout its storage, transformation, duplication, and amplification.

Analog audio signals are susceptible to noise and distortion, due to the innate characteristics of electronic circuits and associated devices. Disturbances in a digital system do not result in error unless they are so large as to result in a symbol being misinterpreted as another symbol or disturb the sequence of symbols. It is therefore, generally possible to have an entirely error-free digital audio system in which no noise or distortion is introduced between conversion to digital format and conversion back to analog.

A digital audio signal may be encoded for correction of any errors that might occur in the storage or transmission of the signal. This technique, known as channel coding, is essential for broadcast or recorded digital systems to maintain bit accuracy. Eight-to-fourteen modulation is the channel code used for the audio compact disc (CD).

Conversion process

If an audio signal is analog, a digital audio system starts with an ADC that converts an analog signal to a digital signal. The ADC runs at a specified sampling rate and converts at a known bit resolution. CD audio, for example, has a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz (44,100 samples per second), and has 16-bit resolution for each stereo channel. Analog signals that have not already been bandlimited must be passed through an anti-aliasing filter before conversion, to prevent the aliasing distortion that is caused by audio signals with frequencies higher than the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate).

A digital audio signal may be stored or transmitted. Digital audio can be stored on a CD, a digital audio player, a hard drive, a USB flash drive, or any other digital data storage device. The digital signal may be altered through digital signal processing, where it may be filtered or have effects applied. Sample-rate conversion including upsampling and downsampling may be used to change signals that have been encoded with a different sampling rate to a common sampling rate prior to processing. Audio data compression techniques, such as MP3, Advanced Audio Coding, Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC, are commonly employed to reduce the file size. Digital audio can be carried over digital audio interfaces such as AES3 or MADI. Digital audio can be carried over a network using audio over Ethernet, audio over IP or other streaming media standards and systems.

For playback, digital audio must be converted back to an analog signal with a DAC. According to the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, with some practical and theoretical restrictions, a band-limited version of the original analog signal can be accurately reconstructed from the digital signal.

During conversion, audio data can be embedded with a digital watermark to prevent piracy and unauthorized use. Watermarking is done using a direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) method. The audio information is then modulated by a pseudo-noise (PN) sequence, then shaped within the frequency domain and put back in the original signal. The strength of the embedding determines the strength of the watermark on the audio data.

Coding
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) was invented by British scientist Alec Reeves in 1937. In 1950, C. Chapin Cutler of Bell Labs filed the patent on differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM), a data compression algorithm. Adaptive DPCM (ADPCM) was introduced by P. Cummiskey, Nikil S. Jayant and James L. Flanagan at Bell Labs in 1973.

Perceptual coding was first used for speech coding compression, with linear predictive coding (LPC). Initial concepts for LPC date back to the work of Fumitada Itakura (Nagoya University) and Shuzo Saito (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) in 1966. During the 1970s, Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs developed a form of LPC called adaptive predictive coding (APC), a perceptual coding algorithm that exploited the masking properties of the human ear, followed in the early 1980s with the code-excited linear prediction (CELP) algorithm.

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding, a lossy compression method first proposed by Nasir Ahmed in 1972, provided the basis for the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), which was developed by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley in 1987. The MDCT is the basis for most audio coding standards, such as Dolby Digital (AC-3), MP3 (MPEG Layer III), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Vorbis (Ogg).

Recording
PCM was used in telecommunications applications long before its first use in commercial broadcast and recording. Commercial digital recording was pioneered in Japan by NHK and Nippon Columbia and their Denon brand, in the 1960s. The first commercial digital recordings were released in 1971.

The BBC also began to experiment with digital audio in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, it had developed a 2-channel recorder, and in 1972 it deployed a digital audio transmission system that linked their broadcast center to their remote transmitters. The first 16-bit PCM recording in the United States was made by Thomas Stockham at the Santa Fe Opera in 1976, on a Soundstream recorder. An improved version of the Soundstream system was used to produce several classical recordings by Telarc in 1978. The 3M digital multitrack recorder in development at the time was based on BBC technology. The first all-digital album recorded on this machine was Ry Cooder's Bop till You Drop in 1979. British record label Decca began development of its own 2-track digital audio recorders in 1978 and released the first European digital recording in 1979.

Popular professional digital multitrack recorders produced by Sony/Studer (DASH) and Mitsubishi (ProDigi) in the early 1980s helped to bring about digital recording's acceptance by the major record companies. Machines for these formats had their own transports built-in as well, using reel-to-reel tape in either 1/4", 1/2", or 1" widths, with the audio data being recorded to the tape using a multi-track stationary tape head. PCM adaptors allowed for stereo digital audio recording on a conventional NTCS or PAL video tape recorder.

The 1982 introduction of the CD by Philips and Sony popularized digital audio with consumers.

ADAT became available in the early 1990s, which allowed eight-track 44.1 or 48 kHz recording on S-VHS cassettes, and DTRS performed a similar function with Hi8 tapes.

Formats like ProDigi and DASH were referred to as SDAT (Stationary-head Digital Audio Tape) formats, as opposed to formats like the PCM adaptor-based systems and DAT, which were referred to as RDAT (Rotating-head Digital Audio Tape) formats, due to their helical-scan process of recording.

Like the DAT cassette, ProDigi and DASH machines also accommodated the obligatory 44.1 kHz sampling rate, but also 48 kHz on all machines, and eventually a 96 kHz sampling rate. They overcame the problems that made typical analog recorders unable to meet the bandwidth (frequency range) demands of digital recording by a combination of higher tape speeds, narrower head gaps used in combination with metal-formulation tapes, and the spreading of data across multiple parallel tracks.

Unlike analog systems, modern digital audio workstations and audio interfaces allow as many channels in as many different sampling rates as the computer can effectively run at a single time. Avid Audio and Steinberg released the first digital audio workstation software programs in 1989. Digital audio workstations make multitrack recording and mixing much easier for large projects which would otherwise be difficult with analog equipment.

Telephony
The rapid development and wide adoption of PCM digital telephony was enabled by metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) switched capacitor (SC) circuit technology, developed in the early 1970s. This led to the development of PCM codec-filter chips in the late 1970s. The silicon-gate CMOS (complementary MOS) PCM codec-filter chip, developed by David A. Hodges and W.C. Black in 1980, has since been the industry standard for digital telephony. By the 1990s, telecommunication networks such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) had been largely digitized with VLSI (very large-scale integration) CMOS PCM codec-filters, widely used in electronic switching systems for telephone exchanges, user-end modems and a range of digital transmission applications such as the integrated services digital network (ISDN), cordless telephones and cell phones.

Technologies
Digital audio is used in broadcasting of audio. Standard technologies include Digital audio broadcasting (DAB), Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), HD Radio and In-band on-channel (IBOC).

Digital audio in recording applications is stored on audio-specific technologies including CD, Digital Audio Tape (DAT), Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and MiniDisc. Digital audio may be stored in a standard audio file formats and stored on a Hard disk recorder, Blu-ray or DVD-Audio. Files may be played back on smartphones, computers or MP3 player. Digital audio resolution is measured in sample depth. Most digital audio formats use a sample depth of either 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit.

Interfaces
For personal computers, USB and IEEE 1394 have provisions to deliver real-time digital audio. USB interfaces have become increasingly popular among independent audio engineers and producers due to their small size and ease of use. In professional architectural or installation applications, many audio over Ethernet protocols and interfaces exist. In broadcasting, a more general audio over IP network technology is favored. In telephony voice over IP is used as a network interface for digital audio for voice communications.

Several interfaces are engineered to carry digital video and audio together, including HDMI and DisplayPort. Some interfaces offer MIDI support as well as XLR and TRS analog ports.

Digital-audio-specific interfaces include:
 * A2DP via Bluetooth
 * AC'97 (Audio Codec 1997) interface between integrated circuits on PC motherboards
 * ADAT Lightpipe interface
 * AES3 interface with XLR connectors, common in professional audio equipment
 * AES47 - professional AES3-style digital audio over Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks
 * Intel High Definition Audio - modern replacement for AC'97
 * I²S (Inter-IC sound) interface between integrated circuits in consumer electronics
 * MADI (Multichannel Audio Digital Interface)
 * MIDI - low-bandwidth interconnect for carrying instrument data; cannot carry sound but can carry digital sample data in non-real time
 * S/PDIF - either over coaxial cable or TOSLINK, common in consumer audio equipment and derived from AES3
 * TDIF, TASCAM proprietary format with D-sub cable

title: Digital audio


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De Beers

The De Beers Group is a South African -British corporation that specializes in the diamond industry, including mining, exploitation, retail, inscription, grading, trading and industrial diamond manufacturing. The company is active in open-pit, underground, large-scale alluvial and coastal mining. It operates in 35 countries with mining taking place in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Canada. It also has an artisanal mining business, Gemfair, which operates in Sierra Leone.

From its inception in 1888 until the start of the 21st century, De Beers controlled 80% to 85% of rough diamond distribution and was considered a monopoly. As of 2000, the company's control of the world diamond supply decreased to 63%.

The company was founded in 1888 by British businessman Cecil Rhodes, who was financed by the South African diamond magnate Alfred Beit and the London-based N M Rothschild & Sons bank. In 1926, Ernest Oppenheimer, a German immigrant to Britain and later South Africa who had earlier founded mining company Anglo American with American financier J. P. Morgan, was elected to the board of De Beers. He built and consolidated the company's global monopoly over the diamond industry until his death in 1957. During this time, he was involved in a number of controversies, including price fixing and trust behaviour, and was accused of not releasing industrial diamonds for the U.S. war effort during World War II.

In 2011, Anglo American took control of De Beers after buying the Oppenheimers' family stake of 40% for US$5.1 billion (£3.2 billion) and increasing its stake to 85%, ending the 80-year Oppenheimer control of the company.

In May 2024, Anglo American announced its intention to spin off or sell De Beers.

Foundation

The name 'De Beers' was derived from the two Dutch settlers, brothers Diederik Arnoldus de Beer (1825–1878) and Johannes Nicolaas de Beer (1830–1883), who owned a South African farm named Vooruitzicht (Dutch for "prospect" or "outlook") near Zandfontein in the Boshof District of Orange Free State. After they discovered diamonds on their land, the increasing demands of the British government forced them to sell their farm on 31 July 1871 to merchant Alfred Johnson Ebden (1820–1908) for £6,600. Vooruitzicht would become the site of the Big Hole and the De Beers mine, two successful diamond mines. Their name, which was given to one of the mines, subsequently became associated with the company.

Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the British South Africa Company, got his start by renting water pumps to miners during the diamond rush that started in 1869, when an 83.5 carat diamond called the 'Star of South Africa' was found at Hopetown near the Orange River in South Africa. He invested the profits of this operation into buying up claims of small mining operators, with his operations soon expanding into a separate mining company. He soon secured funding from the Rothschild family, who would finance his business expansion. De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed in 1888 by the merger of the companies of Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes, by which time the company was the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country. In 1889, Rhodes negotiated a strategic agreement with the London-based Diamond Syndicate, which agreed to purchase a fixed quantity of diamonds at an agreed price, thereby regulating output and maintaining prices. The agreement soon proved to be very successful – for example, during the trade slump of 1891–1892, supply was simply curtailed to maintain the price. Rhodes was concerned about the break-up of the new monopoly, stating to shareholders in 1896 that the company's "only risk is the sudden discovery of new mines, which human nature will work recklessly to the detriment of us all".

The Second Boer War proved to be a challenging time for the company. Kimberley was besieged as soon as war broke out, thereby threatening the company's valuable mines. Rhodes personally moved into the city at the onset of the siege in order to put political pressure on the British government to divert military resources towards relieving the siege rather than more strategic war objectives. Despite being at odds with the military, Rhodes placed the full resources of the company at the disposal of the defenders, manufacturing shells, defences, an armoured train and a gun named Long Cecil in the company workshops.

Oppenheimer control
In 1898, diamonds were discovered on farms near Pretoria, Transvaal. One led to the discovery of the Premier Mine. The Premier Mine was registered in 1902 and the Cullinan Diamond, the largest rough diamond ever discovered, was found there in 1905. (The Premier Mine was renamed the Cullinan Mine in 2003.) However, its owner refused to join the De Beers cartel. Instead, the mine started selling to a pair of independent dealers named Bernard and Ernest Oppenheimer, thereby weakening the De Beers stronghold. Francis Oats, who became Chairman of De Beers in 1908, was dismissive of the threats from the Premier Mine and the finds in German South West Africa. However, production soon equalled all of the De Beers mines combined. Ernest Oppenheimer was appointed the local agent for the powerful London Syndicate, rising to the position of mayor of Kimberley within 10 years. He understood the core principle that underpinned De Beers's success, stating in 1910 that "common sense tells us that the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to make them scarce, that is to reduce production".

During World War I, the Premier Mine was finally absorbed into De Beers. When Rhodes died in 1902, De Beers controlled 90% of the world's diamond production. Ernest Oppenheimer took over the chairmanship of the company in 1929, after buying shares and being appointed to the board in 1926. Oppenheimer was very concerned about the discovery of diamonds in 1908 in German South West Africa, fearing that the increased supply would swamp the market and force prices down. Former CIA chief Admiral Stansfield Turner claimed that De Beers restricted US access to industrial diamonds needed for the country's war effort during World War II.

During the early 1930s, the company conducted experimental work which in large part pioneered the use of diamond drills. This was highly preferable to more expensive and rarer carbons previously in use. The Free State Gold Rush was made possible in part due to this innovation, as the fields required deep drilling to reach gold-bearing reefs.

In May 1955, Ernest Oppenheimer opened the new headquarters which combined the operations of Anglo American and the De Beers group. After Ernest died in November 1957, operation of Anglo and De Beers were passed on to his son, Harry Oppenheimer. Under Harry, the company expanded to several different countries around the globe, including Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Portugal, Zambia, and Tanzania. In South Africa, Harry opposed apartheid, arguing that it hindered economic growth. Despite this, De Beers has been criticized for profiting from the system during the apartheid period. By 1973, Anglo and De Beers accounted for 10 percent of South Africa's gross national product and 30 percent of the country's exports.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, De Beers attempted to secretly enter the United States' diamond market, being forced to divest its American assets in 1975 to avoid the risk of violating anti-trust laws. Harry Oppenheimer stepped down as the chairman and director of Anglo-American and De Beers in December 1982.

21st-century changes

During the 20th century, De Beers used several methods to leverage its dominant position to influence the international diamond market. First, it attempted to convince independent producers to join its single channel monopoly. When that did not work, it flooded the market with diamonds similar to those of producers who refused to join in, depressing their price and undermining return for the resistant. It also purchased and stockpiled diamonds produced by other manufacturers as well as surplus diamonds in order to control prices by limiting supply. Finally, it bought diamonds when prices fell considerably naturally, to constrict supply and drive their value back up, such as during the Great Depression.

In 2000, the De Beers business model changed because of factors such as the decision by producers in Canada and Australia to distribute diamonds outside the De Beers channel, as well as increasingly negative publicity surrounding blood diamonds, which forced De Beers to protect its image by limiting sales to its own mined products.

The combination of a more fragmented and thus more competitive diamond market, increased transparency, and greater liquidity, caused De Beers's market share of rough diamonds to fall from as high as 90% in the 1980s to 29.5% in 2019.

Seeing these developing trends, the Oppenheimer family announced in November 2011 its intention to sell its entire 40% stake in De Beers to Anglo American plc, thereby increasing Anglo American's ownership of the company to 85% (with the remaining 15% owned by the Government of the Republic of Botswana). The transaction was worth £3.2 billion (US$5.1 billion) in cash and ended the Oppenheimer dynasty's 80-year ownership of De Beers.

In 2020, the De Beers Company released a statement of a values change, promising the world that it is committed to not using slave labor within the company.

Marketing
De Beers successfully advertised diamonds to manipulate consumer demand. One of the most effective marketing strategies has been the marketing of diamonds as a symbol of love and commitment. Copywriter Frances Gerety (1916–1999) working for N. W. Ayer & Son coined the famous advertising slogan, 'A Diamond is Forever', in 1947. In 2000, Advertising Age magazine named 'A Diamond is Forever' the best advertising slogan of the 20th century. The slogan may have inspired the James Bond book, film and song title Diamonds Are Forever.

Other successful campaigns include the 'eternity ring' (meant as a symbol of continuing affection and appreciation), the 'trilogy ring' (meant to represent the past, present, and future of a relationship) and the 'right hand ring' (meant to be bought and worn by women as a symbol of independence).

De Beers ran television advertisements featuring silhouettes of people wearing diamonds, set to the music of 'Palladio' by Karl Jenkins. The campaign, titled "Shadows and Lights" first ran in the first quarter of 1993. The song would later inspire a compilation album, Diamond Music, released in 1996, which features the 'Palladio' suite. A 2010 commercial for Verizon Wireless parodied the De Beers spots.

In May 2018, De Beers introduced a new brand of jewellery called "Lightbox" made with synthetic diamonds. The synthetic stones start at $200 for a quarter carat to $800 for a full carat diamond. The new lab-grown diamonds retail for about one-tenth the cost of naturally occurring diamonds. The new brand began selling in September 2018 and the stones are produced in Gresham, Oregon, a $94 million facility using the region's cheap electricity, which opened in 2018 with the capacity for 500,000 rough carats of diamonds per year.

Operations
Mining in Botswana takes place through the mining company Debswana, a 50–50 joint venture with the Government of the Republic of Botswana. It operates four mines – Jwaneng, Orapa, Letlhakane and Damtshaa, though Damtshaa was put on care and maintenance in 2015.

In Namibia, mining is carried out through Namdeb Holdings, a 50–50 joint venture with the Government of the Republic of Namibia. Namdeb Holdings is made up of Debmarine Namibia (covering offshore mining) and Namdeb Diamond Corporation (land-based coastal mining). For offshore mining, motor vessels are used, including the 12,000-tonne, 113-metre-long SS Nujoma, built at a cost of $157 million and named after Sam Nujoma, Namibia's founding president. This vessel, the world's most advanced diamond exploration and sampling vessel, began full operations in June 2017.

De Beers Consolidated Mines is responsible for the De Beers mining in South Africa. It is 74% owned by De Beers and 26% by a board-based black economic empowerment partner, Ponahalo Investments. There are two mines – Venetia and Voorspoed.

In 2008, De Beers began production at the Snap Lake mine in the Northwest Territories, Canada; this was the first De Beers mine outside Africa and was Canada's first completely underground diamond mine. However, production was suspended when the mine was put on care and maintenance in 2015. De Beers opened the Victor mine in Ontario, Canada, the same year, a day after Snap Lake. This was followed by the opening of the company's third mine in Canada, Gahcho Kue, in September 2016.

Trading of rough diamonds takes place through two channels – De Beers Global Sightholder Sales (GSS) and De Beers Auction Sales. GSS sells about 90% of De Beers's rough diamonds, by value, and features wholly owned and joint venture operations in South Africa (De Beers Sightholder Sales South Africa), Botswana (DTCB), and Namibia (NDTC). They sort, value and sell 33% (2013) of the world's rough diamonds by value.

There are two main types of customers for rough diamonds – Sightholders and Accredited Buyers. Sightholders have a term contract. Accredited Buyers (a customer type introduced in 2014–15) have a more ad hoc arrangement. De Beers also sells about 10% of its rough diamonds through online auction sales. The company pioneered the approach in 2008 when it broke with 44 years of direct sales to hold the diamond industry's first online international auction sale. It is now the world's leader in this kind of auction sale.

De Beers employs more than 30,000 people around the globe on five continents, with more than 17,000 employees in Africa. Almost 8,000 people are employed in Botswana, around 6,200 in South Africa, nearly 2,900 in Namibia, some 1,260 in Canada and about 320 in exploration.

In February 2020, De Beers reported its worst set of earnings since the company was bought by miner Anglo American in 2012.

Business structure and brands
On 4 November 2011, Anglo American plc and CHL Holdings announced their agreement for Anglo American to acquire an incremental interest in De Beers, increasing Anglo American's 45% shareholding in the world's leading diamond company to 85%. De Beers plc was originally incorporated as De Beers Société Anonyme in 2000 in Luxembourg. Following the closure of this office, the company was reclassified as De Beers plc in 2017, with its head office now in Jersey. It is made up of two shareholdings: Anglo American plc has an 85% shareholding and the Government of the Republic of Botswana owns 15% directly. De Beers plc is the holding company of The De Beers Group of Companies. It is involved in many parts of the diamond value chain, from mining to sales, and is made up of a series of joint ventures and wholly owned operations.

The joint ventures are:
 * Debmarine Namibia
 * Debswana
 * DTCB
 * Namdeb
 * NDTC

The wholly owned operations are in southern Africa and Canada. Also wholly owned are Forevermark, De Beers Jewellers, the International Institute of Diamond Valuation, De Beers Ventures, the International Institute of Diamond Grading & Research and Element Six (Umicore has a 40% stake in Element Six's abrasives division).

Forevermark
Forevermark was launched in 2008 as one of the two diamond brands from The De Beers Group of Companies. According to the company website, "Each Forevermark diamond is inscribed with a promise: that it is beautiful, rare and responsibly sourced." Forevermark diamonds are inscribed with an icon and unique identification number, albeit invisibly to the naked eye: the Forevermark inscription is $1/20$th of a micron deep. This inscription helps distinguish Forevermark diamonds from other natural diamonds though, similarly to when distinguishing natural diamonds from synthetic diamonds, it requires specialist detection equipment to view. The inscription also helps maintain scarcity: the Forevermark website boasts that only a tiny percentage of diamonds qualify for the Forevermark brand.

De Beers Jewellers
De Beers Diamond Jewellers (DBDJ) was established in 2001 as a 50:50 joint venture between The De Beers Group of Companies and LVMH, the French luxury goods company. The first De Beers boutique opened in 2002 on London's Old Bond Street as the brand's flagship store. Since then, stores have opened in various cities around the world. In March 2017, The De Beers Group of Companies acquired LVMH's 50% shareholding in DBDJ and new name De Beers Jewellers was unveiled.

De Beers Ventures

De Beers Ventures was established by De Beers Group in June 2017 to consider minority stake investments in start-ups and growth companies that could be of benefit to De Beers Group or the broader diamond sector.

The International Institute of Diamond Grading & Research

The International Institute of Diamond Grading & Research (IIDGR) was set up by De Beers in 2008, with the aim of providing a range of services and equipment in the field of diamond verification. It is based in London, Antwerp and, from 2015, in Surat, India. The IIDGR works only on diamonds that meet the requirements of the United Nations' World Diamond Council Kimberley Process.

Blood diamonds and the Kimberley Process
In 1999, a campaign by Global Witness to highlight the role of diamonds in international conflicts led to a review by the United Nations. The initial focus of the UN's investigation was on Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement in Angola, which was found to have bartered uncut diamonds for weaponry despite international economic and diplomatic sanctions being in effect through United Nations Security Council Resolution 1173.

In 1999, De Beers Group stopped all outside buying of diamonds in order to guarantee the conflict-free status of their diamonds effective from 26 March 2000.

In December 2000, following the recommendations of the Fowler Report, the UN adopted the landmark General Assembly Resolution A/RES/55/56 supporting the creation of an international certification scheme for rough diamonds. By November 2002, negotiations between governments, the international diamond industry, led by De Beers, and civil society organisations resulted in the creation of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), which sets out the requirements for controlling rough diamond production and trade and became effective in 2003.

De Beers states that 100% of the diamonds it now sells are conflict-free and that all De Beers diamonds are purchased in compliance with national law, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme and its own Diamond Best Practice Principles. The Kimberley process has helped restore the reputation of the industry, as well as eliminating sources of excess supply.

In 2018, De Beers used blockchain technology to successfully track 100 high-value diamonds. The diamonds were tracked through the manufacturing process from the mine to the retailer in order to ensure their quality and conflict-free status.

In 2019, they launched their own end-to-end traceability platform called Tracr to enable all diamonds to be identified and traced as they move from the mine to the store. Signet and the Russian-based Alrosa are using the technology.

Corporate affairs
In August 2017, De Beers partnered with the Stanford Graduate School of Business to accelerate business ventures to market in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. As part of two programs, the partnership is set to help teach early entrepreneurs how to commercialize their business ideas. The partnership is a three-year, $3 million deal.

In September 2017, De Beers partnered with UN Women to help the advancement of women within the company and the countries it operates in. In 2018, the two entities launched a program to support 500 women micro-entrepreneurs in Blouberg and Musina communities, near De Beers's Venetia diamond mine.

In May 2018, De Beers's group company Element Six launched a lab-grown diamond brand to sell jewellery directly to consumers.

Former operations
International Institute of Diamond Valuation

The International Institute of Diamond Valuation (IIDV) was launched by De Beers Group in March 2016. Operating in partnership with diamond jewellery retailers, it provided a reselling service for all diamonds, regardless of value. In April 2019, De Beers closed its IIDV division.

Sherman Antitrust Act
During World War II, Ernest Oppenheimer attempted to negotiate a way around the Sherman Antitrust Act by proposing that De Beers register a US branch of the Diamond Syndicate Incorporated. In this way, his company could provide the US with the industrial diamonds it desperately sought for the war effort in return for immunity from prosecution after the war; however his proposal was rejected by the US Justice Department when it was discovered that De Beers had no intention of stockpiling any industrial diamonds in the US. In 1945, the Justice Department finally filed an antitrust case against De Beers, but the case was dismissed as the company had no presence on US soil.

Relocation of indigenous San people in Botswana
In Botswana, a long dispute has existed between the interests of the mining company, De Beers, and the San (Bushman) tribe. The San have been facing threats of forcible relocation since 1980s, when the diamond resources were discovered. A campaign was fought in an attempt to bring an end to what the indigenous rights organisation, Survival International, considers to be a genocide of a tribe that has been living in those lands for tens of thousands of years. Several international fashion models, including Iman, Lily Cole and Erin O'Connor, who were previously involved with advertising for the companies' diamonds, supported the campaign. De Beers sold its mine in Botswana to Gem Diamonds in 2007.

Industrial diamonds
In 2004, De Beers pled guilty and paid a US$10 million fine to the United States Department of Justice to settle a 1994 charge that De Beers had colluded with General Electric to fix the price of industrial diamonds. In 2008, De Beers agreed to pay a US$295 million class-action settlement after accusations of price fixing. The company appealed against the decision but ended up paying the settlement in 2013.

European Commission
In February 2006, De Beers entered into legally binding commitments with the European Commission to cease purchasing rough diamonds from Russian mining company Alrosa as of the end of 2008 in order to ensure competition between the two companies.

South Africa's rough diamond trade
In 2014, the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value, based at the University of Manchester, published a report authored by Sarah Bracking and Khadija Sharife, identifying over US$3.3 billion in price fixing within the South African rough diamond trade from 2004 to 2012, leading to an estimated deficit in tax paid of ZAR 1 billion per year. The report found significant evidence of profit shifting through volume and value manipulation. Sharife simultaneously published an article disclosing the political system that cultivated revenue leakage, including the donation of De Beers staff to the State Diamond Trader (SDT). The report, like the article, utilised aggregated data produced by the Kimberley Process (KP) certificates of import-exports, relying on figures listed by the diamond companies themselves, in which De Beers was the dominant player. The South African Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) disclosed that De Beers did not authorise them to publish figures involving values, sales, pricing and other data, preventing transparency of the industry.

title: De Beers