Can I Trust You With My Diamond?

Can I Trust You With My Diamond?

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved



David Allen's store front at 139 N. Main in Sebastopol



Our blessed little town of Sebastopol just gets better and better with the passing of time.  People with great businesses are coming here and raising the quality bar for our local shoppers and diners.  We now have some world-class eateries, artists and viticulturists amongst us, as well as top-rated artisans.  Recently a jeweler named David Allen moved into a location on Main Street that has been a jewelry establishment since its inception as Gold N’ Gems in the 70’s. David’s store, called David Allen Designs is the 4^th iteration of purveyors of goldsmithing and, in my opinion, the culmination of the evolution of this trade here. David is a world-class goldsmith (and platinumsmith) come to town. 

He is the second jeweler named David Allen I have met.  The first David Allen was a custom goldsmith also, but he lived in Blachley, Oregon and made sensational creations for his personal clients as well as important gemstone dealers, one of whom introduced me to the Oregon David: Brick Stange, no longer with us, who was with Mr. Campbell Bridges when he discovered specimens of green grossular garnet near Tsavo National Park in Kenya.

“In 1967 a British geologist by the name of Campbell R. Bridges was looking for gemstones in the mountains in the north-east of Tanzania. Suddenly he came across some strange, potato-like nodules of rock. It was like a fairy-tale: inside these strange objects he found some beautiful green grains and crystal fragments. A gemmological examination revealed that what he had discovered was green grossularite, a mineral belonging to the colourful gemstone group of the garnets, and one which had only been found on rare occasions until then. It was of an extraordinarily beautiful colour and good transparency. The find made the specialists sit up and take notice; Tiffany & Co. in New York also soon showed an interest in the newly discovered green jewel.”  (refer to http://www.gemstone.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107:sapphire&catid=1:gem-by-gem&Itemid=14   for the whole story)



Tsavorite garnet with its frozen chlorine
gas color that captured the imagination of
Tiffany and Co., who gave it its name



Tiffany and Company was so impressed with this green garnet that they named it TSAVORITE and created an overnight fame for the gem.  Brick began marketing them here in the USA and had amassed quite a collection when I met him in the early 1980’s at his home in the Los Altos hills, a home that was castle-like with counter-tops made of slabs of fine black opal in matrix and features that left a life-long impression on me.  He opened drawers of tsavorite to show me, from small round stones measuring 3 millimeters in diameter to large, individual pieces that were so rare I felt faint holding them.  I nearly swooned for real when he opened a large walnut jewelry box (itself a work of art) containing a pendant, a ring and a pair of earrings all made of the finest, museum quality, tsavorite I have ever seen.  The pendant stone was 15 carats, nearly impossible to find in nature.  Garnets are not typically large due to the way they crystallize in the earth, but there they were—large, matching, perfect quality green grossular garnets set into magnificent gold jewelry creations made by David Allen of Blachley, Oregon.  A million-dollar ensemble.

I visited the Oregon David when I was on gem-selling trips to Oregon and Washington, stayed with him in Blachley.  When I saw the sign go up on the Sebastopol jewelry store with the name David Allen on it, I wondered if my friend had moved here from Blachley and opened a retail store.  On my first walk by the store on my way to the bank I fully expected to see a window display with tsavorites the size of door knobs, but saw none.  I wondered if it were the same David, or if there were actually another David Allen also in the jewelry business.  I found a web site and wrote the Sebastopol David who wrote back and clarified the mystery saying he had heard of the other David but was not he, adding that my name sounded familiar to him.  I wrote back and told him that I had brought the famous EightStar cut of diamond to the Western world and he remembered, suggesting we meet in person.

I went to his store to visit and found him to be quite worldly compared to the three jewelers who practiced their craft on the premises before him.  While I was visiting, a lady came in to ask a question about a ring her husband had found at a market where he was employed, that had remained in lost-and-found for a year, never claimed by its owner.  Her husband had given it to her and her question was whether it contained a real diamond or merely some simulant.  David told her that her timing was perfect because one of the world diamond experts was visiting and that surely I could tell her about her ring stone.  I looked at her ring in the microscope and, sure enough, I determined it was indeed a real diamond.

What happened next is what prompted me to write this blog post because it was a universal jewelry store moment, one that has entered the minds of tens of thousands of people all over the world as they see no alternative to parting, temporarily, with their diamond in order for the jeweler to tighten a prong, clean a ring, remove the diamond, perhaps, in order to create a new piece for it to be mounted into or other possible alternatives.  This lady, as have countless others, had heard some fear-inducing horror stories from relatives involving the cognitive dissonance created by the suspicion that the jeweler may switch diamonds, or worse, substitute a white zircon, white sapphire, colorless topaz, a faceted yttrium aluminum garnet, Moissanite, cubic zirconium, or some other diamond substitute, allowing the jeweler to essentially steal a stone and fool a client.

Has this ever happened?  Yes, of course.

If you put a gun on a table that is loaded, you could say there is something dangerous there.  Yet, in truth, the danger, latent in the gun or not, is meaningless until the gun is put in the hands of a human being.  We are all a little different from each other; some of us are much different than others.  The police officer who picks up the gun to holster and drive his or her beat to protect society presents, perhaps, one of the least dangerous scenarios as the motive behind the holstering and the usage of the gun is socially endorsed and reasonable, acceptable to most of us.  The murderer, whose motive is socially destructive, changes the metric so that it is warped by comparison to that of the officer and brings danger to the gun scenario.

A diamond placed into the hands of a reputable jeweler is safe and considered sacred as a possession of the person who entrusted it to that jeweler.  That diamond will be returned to that customer, no doubt at all.  The unscrupulous jeweler is, beyond the status of jeweler, an unscrupulous PERSON with a life agenda built on ulterior motives.  This is the wrong person to give your diamond to.  And how can you know?

To further the analogy of the gun, a weapon can be cocked and ready to fire.  People can, similarly, be “cocked” and ready to explode if betrayed.  Since it is embedded in our mass social consciousness that there is vulnerability in jewelry stores where the owner is unscrupulous, a diamond-switching betrayal, once discovered, pulls the cocked trigger in us and makes us broadcast as loud and far as we are able what has happened to us, triggers fear and scorn for the betraying jeweler and, almost instantly, explodes his or her reputation and implodes his or her business.  In short, a diamond-switcher cannot make it in business.

I could see the concern in the lady’s face and, at the same time, read David Allen’s countenance for his macro perspective of this common cognitive dissonance, this fear of loss.  And as I suspected, out of the mouth of the customer came the words set there by two of her relatives who had passed along our customary social diamond-switch phobia.

I had a different context to frame David in.  I already knew that he had been in the business for decades and that his background was one any jeweler would be proud to have.  About the same time I got into the gemstone business in the late 70’s, David went to work for an up-and-coming jeweler on the San Francisco Peninsula named Tim Fidge who “founded the original custom jewelry shop, ‘Gold Fever,’ on Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto in 1976. Three years later, the store moved to Town & Country Village shopping center in Palo Alto, and in 1985, he changed its name to ‘Timothy Fidge & Co.’”

Tim died in a plane crash while still a fairly young man, leaving his wife to run the business.  And what a business it was.  Tim was a smart risk-taker, a quality, when combined with good luck, can propel a business owner to great heights.  In the early 1980’s I was approached by a missionary who had gone to Brazil to spread her religion in a remote area of Minas Gerais.  While there she found that local villagers lived in poverty but had access to riches since 80% of the Brazilian gemstones were mined not far from their village.  (Brazil supplies a SUBSTANTIAL amount of gem rough to the world: aquamarine, tourmaline, topaz, amethyst, chrysoberyl, alexandrite and others).  This distaff missionary conceived an idea that, by itself, lifted her host village out of poverty. 

She saw that huge amounts of topaz were being mined and cut nearby and made a proposal to the company in charge of production asking to be “fronted” a large quantity of topaz she could take to America and sell.  As she moved around America she was guided to gem dealers in each area and our paths crossed when she got to the San Francisco Bay Area.  She was carrying thousands of carats of the most beautiful imperial topaz available, clean material cut well, saturated with great color, and offered it to me cheaply.  I had four salespeople at the time and wasted no time calling them in to get their parcels of topaz to go out on the road with to offer to retail jewelers.  America was in a recession at the time, so it was difficult to get retailers to commit to purchase anything.  They mostly wanted it consigned to them, but I priced it to sell, not to consign.  I priced it so low, that a smart retailer could be guaranteed an almost obscene return on investment.  Still, smart or not, those retailers were too afraid to commit to any large purchases, so each salesperson on my staff was able to sell one piece here and one piece there.  However, my salesman who covered the peninsula went to Tim Fidge’s store and struck pay dirt, so to speak.  Fidge saw the opportunity for what it was, recognized this as the opportunity of a lifetime and bought everything my salesman had with him and then called for more.  After watching Tim demonstrate his entrepreneurial prowess, it came as no surprise to me that he quickly rose up the ranks of the jewelers and was soon in the league of the other major retailers south of San Francisco such as Gleim the Jeweler, Steiners and Sally Morton, retail establishments catering to serious jewelry buyers begun by grandparents of the current owners, and became, during the first generation of store ownership, one of America’s most important jewelry store owners.

It was with Tim Fidge that David Allen became a master goldsmith and, after a few years, ran the entire goldsmithing operation for Tim.  David was entrusted with one of the most important parts of Fidge’s operation and shined there.

With this in mind, I chuckled to myself as the lady with the found diamond expressed her concern about leaving her ring with David.  He addressed her fears appropriately and I told her she had nothing to worry about, but, of course, because there is a universe of space between all minds in the world, how would it be possible for her, or anybody for that matter, to know David’s background and put him in the context of a trustworthy jeweler?  Because I spent so many decades in the trade, I have that context in my mind and I know that David is entirely trustworthy, competent, able, and has a goldsmithing history that is the envy of jewelers everywhere.

That lady left her ring and was able to pick it up the next day, happy about finding the ring, happy about finding the right jeweler.  And, best of all, it happened in my little town of Sebastopol where life just keeps getting better and better.

Ice Cream so Amazing it Gives you the Chills

Ice Cream so Amazing that it Gives you the Chills

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

I grew up in a household where we were expected to do our best all the time.  My mother and father were both over-achievers and were propelled by this do-best philosophy all through their lives.  My father graduated from Stanford with a 4.0 GPA in 1924 and became a doctor, a pharmacist and the owner of an ambulance company all at the same time.  My mother started out as a stenographer at North American Aviation Company and worked her way up to become the confidential secretary of the president of Rockwell.  I felt like there was always something pushing me along to keep making things right and it was many years before this became part of my character rather than a force I tried to resist.

I have a radar for this personality type and appreciate those who strive to achieve greatness.  Perhaps this explains why my first trip to a new business in my town of Sebastopol was so deeply gratifying.  On the corner of the two highways that criss-cross each other in the center of our little town, where there used to be a T-shirt shop called Gone Tropo, one day in 2005, as I passed along I saw a sign on the building that said Screamin’ Mimi’s and wondered what on earth that might be.  I parked the car, walked back to the intersection and saw it was an ice cream store, an exciting find indeed.

Years before, when on a selling trip in my colored gemstone business to central California, I had stumbled across SLO Maid, a gourmet ice cream shop on the main drag of San Luis Obispo.  Ice cream stores are tough for me to not go into.  I was amply rewarded by a quality of ice cream I had not tasted since I was a little boy.  I made it a point to go to this particular store every time I was selling gems on the central coast until one day something happened to the quality and the ice cream seemed watered down, perhaps to increase profits.  I am not sure what it was, but whatever it was caused the death of the business and SLO Maid shut its doors.

I remember wishing we had something similar to SLO Maid here in Sonoma County.

And there was the jewel I had been dreaming of, right there in my little town.  Fearing yet another disillusion, I asked for a sample of chocolate chip ice cream. “We call our chocolate chip ‘Galaxy’”, I was told by the proprietress who had only recently opened her door. Skeptically I put the tasting spoon into my mouth and…..WOW!!!!!!   This was the real thing, the best I had ever tasted, bar none.

I asked Maraline Olson, that proprietress, (Mimi) how she had come to bring everybody’s ice cream dream to our little town.  The way she told it, she had come here from New York wanting to settle and was studying business at Santa Rosa Junior College when a professor advised his students who wondered what business to go into to delve into something they loved and felt passion for.  When Maraline heard those words, ice cream came to mind.

The recipes available for home-made ice cream exist in the thousands, perhaps the tens of thousands and they mostly lead you to duplicates of mediocrity ubiquitously available all over our planet.  Maraline had to rise far above mediocrity to make something special happen in her world, and she set about to create her own recipes.

I will never forget the look on her face when I asked her what her formula consisted of.  Her warm and knowing smile disappeared from her face to be replaced with a look you would expect to see on the countenance of an agent of the National Security Agency who had just been asked about America’s most guarded nuclear secrets.  She did not ask me to leave, but had I pursued it further, my guess is that she would have turned away and left me standing there.  Instead we both smiled at each other and I ordered the biggest milk shake she could make me out of Galaxy ice cream.

I owned a diamond factory in the county seat (Santa Rosa) at the time.  My drive home took me by, you guessed it, Screamin’ Mimi’s every day of the week and I took full advantage of my new find and repeated my Galaxy treat daily.  I could not believe how perfect and smooth that ice cream was, how awesome the taste, texture, richness.  It was one of those experiences that make your senses report to you that you are experiencing something world-class, something that is the product of another human’s passion to achieve greatness.

Slowly but surely people began to flock to Mimi’s from Sebastopol, from other Sonoma County towns, then other states and other countries.  Maraline put a map up on the wall along which the line forms to order up your treats.  She provided little colored push pins for customers to insert on the map indicating where they came from.  I am including a photograph of that map, still there, showing that Mimi’s fame now reaches around the world.

Hats off to anybody with that special, highly revered quality that puts him or her on a path to greatness fueled by the kind of passion we all admire.  Hats off to the business professor who pointed to that path and suggested Marline follow her passion.  By doing so, Maraline Olson has become a pillar of our community, inflexible in the quest for quality, forever devoted to the highest standards there are.  If you like ice cream, you will be floored by the Screamin’ Mimi’s experience.  Trust me.

Here is how she puts it:

Our Purpose at Screamin' Mimi's . . .

      Ice cream is fun, but we take it seriously! Our passion is to make the very best ice cream and sorbet in the world. We feature the finest, all natural ingredients from all over the world including fresh products from Sonoma County. We can taste the difference and we think you will too.

Richard von Sternberg

September 27, 2012

A West County Valley that Cannot Change

A Valley that Cannot Change

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

I will return to my story about the revolution that took place in the world of diamonds with my next blog posting.  Meanwhile, I would like to help celebrate a local hero who, like many others, worried we were developing our country to death with neighborhoods and mini-estates, turning our backs on our rural beginnings.

North of San Francisco about one hour, in the area known as “West County”, there is a tranquil Wine Country valley, gently nestled in the hills to the west of Santa Rosa that separate the Santa Rosa Plain from the Sonoma County coast, a valley named Blucher Valley.  The main road that connects Blucher Valley with the rest of the county, Bloomfield Road, descends into it after climbing uphill from Gravenstein Highway passing small roadside businesses, rural residences and a school past which the road narrows, changing from semi-rural to full-blown rural on its way past former apple orchards, current vineyards and Christmas tree farms.

At about the same place where Bloomfield Road actually touches Blucher Valley, Blucher Valley Road, not surprisingly, also touches the valley.  Ironically, the main road through the actual valley is Canfield Road, not Blucher Valley Road.  Blucher Valley Road, like Bloomfield Road, descends into Blucher Valley along Blucher Creek as it meanders through the canyon where it origniates and crosses Canfield Road on its way to the Laguna de Santa Rosa, in the middle of land that once belonged to a gentleman known locally as "Bud", born Bernard Nahmens in the valley about a third of the way through the 20th century, October 19, 1931.  The house he lived in is still standing on Canfield Road, down a hill below its crest.



House where "Bud" was born



On a hot summer day, when the temperature hits the century mark in Santa Rosa, the little valleys to the west which are, like Blucher Valley, affected by the marine influence of the icy Northern California waters of the Pacific Ocean., get into the high 70’s and low 80’s.  Summer night temperatures are in the 40’s and 50’s and, as in most areas of Sebastopol, it can be “drippy” in the morning after the late afternoon overcast has covered the area.  Evidently Pinot Noir thrives in this climate as did the Gravenstein apples grown here from the late 1800’s.  Kendall-Jackson planted their first organic Pinot Noir vineyard at the western end of Blucher Valley on a square mile of land that was one of the last land grants in California, one owned by the Carrillo family, famous in Sonoma County, headed by the son-in-law of Mariano Vallejo.

It is chilly here and a bit windy compared to Healdsburg or Sonoma, areas known for their summer heat.  Hence “Bud” grew up in one of California’s magical microclimates where agriculture flourishes, at a time when families owned dairy farms and ranches of hundreds of acres or even thousands of acres. 

Bud’s mother and father came here from an island community in the North Sea named Föhr where people either farmed, fished or hunted whales.  During the rugged North Sea winters, the daytime temperature averaged about 35 degrees.  Summer days that got beyond the 50’s were pretty rare.  Days in the 60’s probably talked about for weeks.  For George and Tita Nahmens who began their life in Blucher Valley with a dairy and poultry farm on Canfield Road, discovering the little valley's microclimate must have seemed like the final shedding of a case of the Winter Blues that most Californians have never had to suffer or even imagine.



The Isle of Föhr in the North Sea

Mr. and Mrs. Nahmens were descendents of rugged island folk dominated centuries ago by Dutch conquerors, and later, Prussian ones, people who spoke German as well as their own native language.  They were not at all unfamiliar with adversity and had no problem settling down to a life of honest muscle-straining work that required constant attention, during a time when people had to be resourceful and creative to address daily “fix it” mini-crises inherent in country living, especially so before the ushering in of the super store with everything, like Home Depot.  They were resourceful country folk who made it comfortably as they passed through the Depression and World War II, folks living a sweet life in the coastal foothills of Northern California.  They were farmers in an era when DDT was a commonly-used pesticide, when weeds were to be eradicated, when war was declared on all pests. 

In spite of this, Bud was a visionary who grew up loving his surroundings.  His parents taught him well, nurtured his instinct to live harmoniously and in balance with nature to the extent that it became part of his life philosophy to leave the land better than he found it. Bud became an adult in a time when DDT was outlawed in America and, possibly due to this, evolved to a higher level of understanding of the intimate relationship between ourselves and the land we draw our life from.  He took over the dairy operations from his parents in 1962

As you drive through this little valley it appears that nothing has changed in decades, save for a few spendy custom homes.  To quote one of my real estate clients who stood on a hill overlooking Bud’s valley: “It reminds me of the old California”.  When George and Tita built their ranch in the 20’s, there were national programs to electrify rural America and extend the postal service with the Rural Free Delivery program.  People lit their homes with gas and kerosene lanterns and cooked on woodstoves.

At some point the electric lines and phone wires arrived and lives changed almost as much as they did with radio and television.  Times and philosophies underwent a kind of kaleidoscopic transformation during the 1960’s that tugged at the heartstrings of many local farmers and pulled them into the organic movement here, gave them a new kind of respect as they took on a role loftier than mere agribusiness: "Bud's goal was to preserve the land. He always felt farmers were the best stewards of the land in Sonoma County," said his wife, Janet Nahmens (this quote is from an internet eulogy)

The most sensitive side of Bud surfaced when he came to know of the endangerment of the Sebastopol Meadowfoam flower.  Bud actually took steps to change the way he farmed in order to preserve this endangered species.  His concern for the local watershed made him embark on a restoration program for Blucher Creek, an activity for which he was honored by Nature Conservancy in the late 1980’s early in his retirement from dairying.  In the mid 1980’s he sold his dairy herd and switched to beef cattle.

I remember when that happened.  I never met Bud, but the view from my living room window includes the Kendall Jackson vineyard I mentioned earlier as well as Blucher Valley.  When Bud made an arrangement to preserve his land for agricultural purposes, when he “Preserved his land by selling his development rights to the Sonoma County Agriculture Preservation and Open Space District.”, he froze history and moved very high up my list of heroes.  Because Bud, who died March 10, 2004, chose not to sell his land to land sub-dividers and developers, my beautiful view will always be beautiful and the valley will always be the valley.

Richard von Sternberg

May 5, 2012

The Birth of the Eightstar Diamond

Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 3

Birth of the Eightstar Diamond

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

In my last blog post, which I called “Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 2”, I spoke about a little of the life of one of the most powerful people I have met in my lifetime, Tamura-san, a man who brought the Eastern way of Japanese thinking to Western-style diamond cutting and polishing.  Tamura discovered a hole in the logic of diamond quality analysis – as far as it relates to the quality of the cutting in particular – that was so broad, it appeared as a house of beautiful features built on a foundation of untruth. This gentleman entrepreneur elevated Sony from not much more than a business plan to a giant phenomenon, a world business model, retired, and embarked on a quest for perfectly cut diamonds. During his hunting campaign he struck out in more than one country and changed the course of diamond cutting history profoundly and forever when he decided to open a cutting factory in Tokyo devoted to making every diamond optically perfect.



Mr. Tamura, Diamond Revolutionary



When he began, he knew more about diamonds than anybody else in the world and also knew less about diamonds than the people he originally thought of as experts.  As much as this may seem a contradiction, the fact was that he knew nothing of the components of the octahedral carbon crystal, nothing of the dops, tangs and scaifes that were the stuff of the diamond polishing industry, nothing of the refractometrical “critical angle” of carbon that Tolkowsky the physicist (and others) postulated as the basis of ideal diamond cutting, He had developed only a very rudimentary knowledge of the mathematical ratios between the table diameter, the depth and the overall diameter of the diamond or the ideal angles of the 8 main facets on the crown and the pavilion of the diamond.  His knowledge of the color grade or clarity grade of a diamond was beginner level.

Yet his 60 thousand (or so) looks through the Firescope at real diamonds had systematically developed a three-dimensional consciousness of the cutting of any diamond, 60 thousand intuitive, straightforward looks at the truth of how a diamond was cut, unmistakably clear even to the untrained eye.  His knowledge was cumulative as he learned something from every look into the Firescope.  He learned developmentally through his viewings to recognize patterns that explained what he saw.  

After his many months of observations and learning-by-doing, he was in a class by himself for a time.  From his self-created lofty, heretofore unknown perspective, Tamura sculpted a vision of diamonds so avant-garde, so revolutionary, that it would be years before the mysterious and esoteric diamond industry would catch up to it.  His vision would come to shake the entire diamond industry and, abetted by the simultaneous revolution in information dissemination -- the Internet -- cause it to reinvent itself after 500 years of tradition.

He began his experiment in Yotsuya in his Pyramid building with the help of Mr. Higuchi, a cutter of sapphires and diamonds whose reputation was golden in Japanese cutting circles.  Tamura did not need to make money because he was already comfortable.  His motivation to succeed was Quixotic in that it was based entirely on a personally-developed ideal that began in his heart: a dreamy ideal about rescuing diamonds from the shabby way they were cut that prevented them from being the beacons of light he knew they could be.  Therefore, when he hired Higuchi-san, he fulfilled an impossible dream for him by allowing him to acquire everything he thought he would need in order to make diamonds sparkle in ways nobody thought possible.  All the equipment, powders, dops, tangs, cutting wheels, girdling equipment, acids for boiling and cleaning diamonds, measuring devices, lenses, lighting, practice diamonds………anything he needed was made available to Mr. Higuchi.



Mr. Kiyoshi Higuchi



Tamura explained to Higuchi what it was that he wanted to accomplish, let him look through the Firescope at several diamonds, showed him the 3 little diamonds that he had discovered cut perfectly by accident and asked him if he thought he could cut all diamonds this way.

“I think so,” he replied.  He told Tamura it would take him some time to understand what he needed to do to make them appear the way they needed to look in the Firescope. His task was to cut diamonds to have three-dimensional optical symmetry required to send light to all the proper places, in the proper order and end up making a BANG as it emerged from the diamond, lighting up the eyes of its viewer.

Higuchi was calm, centered, inquisitive, experimental, methodical, intuitive, he was the kind of person a Westerner conjures up in his or her mind when thinking of Zen. He began to wrap himself around his challenge from the first minute, picked up his master’s calling like Sancho Panza did that of Don Quijote, and set out to change history.

At the end of his first day, and the next, and the following dozens, Higuchi got nowhere, made no progress at all.  If you study the Firescope photograph a little, you will see that there are two patterns of black “arrows”.  There are 8 of them inside the inner circle you see and 8 outside. The inner arrows are reflections of actual facets. Those 8 inner arrows show you if the 8 main facets on the bottom of the diamond are of equal length, width and have identical shape.  More importantly, however, those facet reflections tell you if the facets are plumb and have correct caster and camber relative to the imaginary axis from the top to the bottom of the diamond.

Diamond cutting pioneers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries contributed to a generally accepted hypothesis that the angle of the bottom main facet needed to be at 40.75 degrees relative to that imaginary axis.  40.75 became the magic number on the bottom of the diamond, 34.50 became the magic number for the top main facets.  These were the “targets” of the ideal cutter.  These were Higuchi’s targets.  He aimed at the targets, achieved them, put the finished diamond into the Firescope and saw the telltale white areas where light was simply passing through the diamond instead of being placed on the conveyer belt of the scientific light path through the diamond.

At first Higuchi doubted himself.  Was it bad cutting, bad measuring?

Go back to those black arrows in the Firescope image.  Think of any one of them as the reflection of something that you can move around with your computer.  You can move one of the arrows left or right, up or down or twist left or right from its place, the way an airplane does when the pilot “banks” the plane.  The plane can bank to the left or the right depending on which direction the pilot is turning the plane. 

If you look at the black arrow and think of banking to the left or banking to the right, like an airplane, you are keeping the facet on one plane, but changing its attitude three-dimensionally.  If the facet is applied to the diamond this way, where it may be the right length, the right shape and be placed at the right angle, if it is banking to the left or right, it is twisted away from its correct light-path direction and will allow light to pass through the diamond at that point.  One facet being applied this way would corrupt the perfect pattern you see in the enclosed photograph creating one small area of light leakage that drains away beauty from a diamond, in Tamura’s perception, the same way a hole in a boat makes the boat sink.

Higuchi’s facets did not just bank to the left or right, they were not all the same length, they were not all the same shape and did not appear symmetrical the way the photo in this blog post does.  In that imaginary computer program I spoke of earlier, where you can move the facets around any way you like, ANY movement of any kind away from perfect was wrong as far as Tamura was concerned.  The star formed by the arrows, the eight-rayed star, was the stimulus for the name Tamura gave his diamond: the Eightstar diamond.  Because of this, all diamonds had to look the same in the Firescope or they did not pass quality control, meaning Mr. Tamura’s eye. 

Diamond Cutting Equipment
M.G.M & Company

He began with standards that no diamond cutter on earth knew how to meet except by accident.  The equipment that a cutter uses is “adjustable”.  While it holds the diamond in place with a dop, the hand-held cutting device, known as a tang, can be adjusted in several places to change the angle at which the diamond makes contact with the rotating scaife, the metal wheel incrusted with tiny shards and fragments of crushed industrial diamonds, called “bort”.  The wheel spins and the diamond is laid against the abrasive spinning surface beneath it much the way a piece of wood is set against a piece of rotating sandpaper on a sanding machine.  Just as the wood is sanded away by the abrasion of the rotating pieces of garnet shards in the sandpaper, diamond is sanded away by the action of the tiny diamond shards.

In the background, however is the biggest problem for the cutter attempting to apply a facet that is symmetrical from the perspective of all three dimensions: the grain of a diamond.  The grain in the wood forces the woodworker to turn the wood a preferred way to get the smoothest surface, or to consider whether to cut with or against the grain, or what to do about a knot.  Diamonds have grain and knots as well.  The trouble is that it is impossible to cut a diamond against the will of its grain because you are dealing with the hardest substance in the universe we know of so far that can be mined in mass quantities and sold through a hugely profitable chain of distribution through cutting companies and jewelers around the world.

Cutters in factories over the centuries knew hundreds of years ago that grain direction in a diamond constricted their cutting possibilities.  If you are attempting to cut a facet and you find that you are working against the grain, you have to take advantage of the fact that grain is directional.  You can adjust the equipment so that the plane of the facet changes even though its angle stays the same.  You bank to the left or right, and the cutting begins to occur.  In one direction you can put the diamond on the cutting wheel and go out to lunch, in another country !!!!!   A diamond has some directions in which is simply will not cut.  Twisting the facet a little allows the diamond to be placed on the wheel approaching the grain from a slightly different direction which achieves two things at once:  it simplifies the process for the cutter while it corrupts the three-dimensional symmetry of the diamond.

Soon it occurred to Higuchi that it was necessary to know more about the grain of a diamond than anybody had been able to learn to date.  Since grain is not something you can see with your eye, you have to “experience” it during cutting.  Tamura’s cutter began to lay the ground for the first scientific rules of optical diamond cutting by placing a facet on the wheel in one direction (imagine looking at a clock and seeing the facet like a hand on a clock in the 12 o’clock position).  He would choose a particular clock direction, apply the facet to the wheel and study the facet to see if it was cutting in that position.  Then he rotated one clock position and did that with every facet on the diamond, including the table, until he had built a huge compendium of information nobody knew exactly how to sort out.

By learning what diamonds did in certain directions on one facet relative to others of the 58 facets, he ascertained a method of knowing where to begin the cutting on the diamond so that every direction he turned it allowed cutting to occur according to the three-dimensional boundaries of angle, shape and banking to the left or right.  He labored for months, almost two years, grinding through many parcels of diamonds, turning them into dust, losing them entirely to science and experimentation before he was able to achieve the results Tamura was very anxious to hear about.

Tamura had set the parameters with the Firescope so that there was only one way a diamond could look.  Perfect or not perfect as Tamura saw it.  On the first day of work Tamura gave this speech to the staff:

"The diamond I want has absolutely nothing to do with the diamonds on the market today.  If I'd wanted diamonds like that, I would never have bothered setting up a factory in a place like this.  In fact, I would never have set up a factory at all.  What I want you all to understand today is why we are here, and the significance of what we are about to do.

            "The diamond I want has to appear completely red under the FireScope, with a sharp, clear eight-pointed star floating in the middle.  It has to be sharp and clear.  I'm not interested in more-or-less.

            "I'm a complete amateur when it comes to diamonds.  I know next to nothing about polishing, so some of the things I say may strike you as nonsense.  Believe me, though, when I say that I'm putting my heart and soul into making this thing happen.  And I want all of you to do the same.

            "If I wanted to polish run-of-the-mill diamonds, I wouldn't bother to do it myself.  I could easily let someone else do it for me.  But if you'd seen as many diamonds as I've seen over the past year, and if you'd seen the appalling quality of the cutting I've seen, you'd understand why I feel so passionately about it.  No diamond deserves that kind of treatment.  One way or another I have to produce a perfect stone.  And by perfect I mean one that looks perfectly beautiful in the FireScope.

            "The FireScope has redefined perfection.  We may be new in this business, but never forget that when it comes to diamond brilliance, we are way ahead of everyone else.  So anything that looks beautiful to us is unmistakably the best.

            "If we can succeed in polishing the diamond we want, it'll show the diamond cutters of the world that we were right.  That's why we have to believe in what we're doing, and put everything we've got into it.  For five hundred years nobody has done what we're going to try to do, and if we don't do it now, nobody else ever will.

            "That's why, whenever you run into seemingly insurmountable problems -- as you no doubt will -- I want you to stick in there and see it through.

            "If you ever find yourself at a complete loss what to do next, then remember this -- go back and look in the FireScope.  The FireScope is the only mirror of truth in the entire diamond industry.”

Higuchi-san appeared one day in Tamura’s office with the magic diamond, the one Tamura said was just right.  He told Higuchi to go back and do it again.  But he could not.  He could not replicate his work on the second diamond because it was grained differently.  What Higuchi needed was not just an understanding of how to find the grain, but to predict the grain directions in each diamond by a series of charted formulae.  He set about for three months to codify his method and created what later became the most coveted trade secret in diamond cutting history.  One day in the middle of the 1980’s he told Tamura that he was now able to cut any diamond to the specifications of Eightstar at will.  On that day Mr. Higuchi achieved the status of the most important diamond cutter of our time.

Tamura took his diamond to a gemological laboratory in Tokyo and astonished the director and the entire team of gemologists there.  They had never seen anything like the Eightstar diamond, had never even imagined such a thing.  They declared it to be the new world standard for diamond cutting.

Ironically the presence of the new perfect diamond was received as a great accomplishment, but not swallowed up at the jewelry counters of Japan the way it would have been in our country.  That is because the custom in Japan at the time was to get a diamond only as an engagement stone to be put in the one diamond ring that Japanese ladies wore.  The people who Tamura knew all had their diamonds. 

For a spell Tamura felt he had created a diamond museum until one day one of his salespeople had an epiphany occur as he stared at a photograph of an Eightstar diamond, a photo similar to the one in this blog post.  In his mind, he removed the red and saw only the black part of the photo and it suddenly dawned on him that the familiar feeling he was getting was due to the fact that the same pattern is used in the Japanese RINBO, or Dharma-Wheel as we call it in the West.  The salesman was Buddhist so that really mattered.  He could not wait to share his vision with Tamura who was elated by that discovery.

The Rinbo, or Dharma Wheel, on left

Now people wanted one whether they had a diamond or not.  Buddhism is a large movement in Asia and a symbol of Buddhism in the diamond was big news.  Tamura went from museum curator to holder of a waiting list thousands long almost overnight.  The great revolution in diamond cutting of the 20^th century was jump-started by a commonly revered symbol of the Orient and began to gather steam until it seemed impossible for Tamura to meet the demand.

One night, while entertaining an American gentleman Tamura’s wife had met through her booking agency, he lamented the difficulty of his situation out loud at the dinner table. The American gentleman had that entrepreneurial instinct Tamura was famous for and offered to help out by opening a diamond cutting factory in northern California where he lived.  If Tamura would train some cutters for him, he could lighten the load and allow Tamura to expand his cutting capability and catch up with demand.  Tamura felt fate had led him to the solution to his new enormous, pressing problem.

It was because of this encounter in Tokyo that I was to meet Mr. Tamura later in Santa Rosa (California) and help change the course of diamond cutting history.  This will be the topic of my next blog.

Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 2--What happened in Japan

Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 2

     What happened to diamonds in Japan

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

In my last blog post, which I called “Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 1”, I attempted to give a sense of what must happen to the shape of a cut diamond in order for it to put on the light show diamonds are famous for.  I labeled the facets of a diamond and gave the proportions that are generally included in ideal diamond cutting standards.  Sample photographs were provided that show brilliance occurring, actual observable brilliance as seen in a Firescope as well as fire occurring, actual photographable rainbows being dispersed using a device I commissioned to be made by an MIT engineer with two advanced degrees.  My thesis is that the more perfectly cut a diamond is, the more beautiful it becomes as its power to unleash the spectacular play of color, brilliance and sparkle comes from a perfect man-made path of light.  With the invention of the Firescope (1984) came the first ability to actually see with one’s own eye what path light was taking in a diamond and, as a result, to judge the quality of its cutting in an intuitive way.

A Japanese entrepreneur, having just looked into a Firescope for the first time said: “With a shock it suddenly occurred to me that what we had here was a device that clearly and unmistakably showed how good or bad a diamond’s cut was.  All that was needed was the human eye.  All you had to do was look for yourself.”  This gentleman, a complete outsider to the world of diamonds, would eventually discover a huge hole in that world of diamonds and be sucked by its vacuum into the deepest chambers of the fine art of diamond cutting, or diamond polishing as it is referred to in the trade.

MR. TAMURA

Mr. Tamura is no ordinary person by the standards of any culture.  He is a natural leader, a handsome gentleman who can sing with a strong and beautiful voice, entertain an audience of thousands, build a business empire and go on to initiate a HUGE revolution in diamonds that has transformed the way diamonds are cut and polished, graded, certified, marketed, promoted and how, because of this man and myself, are sold with emphasis on actual optical proof of symmetrical cutting.

TAMURA AND SONY

Early in its history, Tamura-san approached Sony, impressed by their “out-of-the-box-and-into-action” philosophy, and told them he wanted to distribute their products.  He was a young man who could draw a crowd in Tokyo impersonating Elvis.  (I cannot think of anybody I ever met who knew so much about Elvis or was as fond of him as Mr. Tamura.) He was interesting in conversation, intelligent, far-seeing, mesmerizing.  They wanted him at Sony. 

He put one condition on his relationship that nearly cost him the empire he created: he insisted on being in business for himself.  Apparently there was some in-house discussion about whether Tamura should be an employee or not.  In the end, Tamura prevailed and went on to create the entrepreneurial dream of creating a nation-wide Sony distribution network with, at its apogee, 400 salespeople servicing accounts all over Japan.  He built a building in Yotsuya, a financial center of Tokyo, in the shape of a pyramid to symbolize his empire.

A SECONDARY REASON FOR RETIRING

One day in the 1970’s, on Tamura’s 43^rd birthday, he summoned a convocation of his employees and announced two things to them that were so profound as to be picked up on and reported by the media:

1.     Retiring

2.     Gifting the Company

Mr. Tamura was taxed and tired from forging the pioneer enterprise he did and was ready to break new sociological ground in Japan by retiring.  People didn’t retire in Japan in the sense we have come to understand retirement today.  He made headlines with this idea.  He announced his retirement at his convocation and made a gift of the company to his employees at the same time.  He actually gave away the company to its employees, in other words, a very newsworthy event.

Tamura’s acts sent out waves in all directions and brought lines of people to his door looking for opportunity, direction, and guidance from a master.  He gave everybody some time to say what they had to offer, only a little.  On his hidden agenda was his search for a new opportunity for himself, feeling too young at 43 to retire to a rocking chair.  One at a time people came in for a moment with Tamura, one at a time they were told thank you and good-bye.

A DIAMOND DEALER WITH BIG IDEAS

One day a man Tamura called Ken in his book showed up from what for Tamura was a different world, explaining he was a purveyor of diamonds.  Tamura said he could make the meeting quite easy and brief by announcing he was simply not interested in diamonds, then stood up and expected Ken to leave. “Diamonds leave me cold,” Tamura announced.  Ken surprised Tamura by saying he had brought a diamond to show with a cut based on science.  I was told a few years later it was this word science that caught his attention since he had never associated science with diamonds; only romance and high prices.  Ken was asked, “What does science have to do with it?”

Tamura was told about the physicist Tolkowsky, the physics of diamond proportioning and the importance of what Ken was referring to as ideally cut diamonds.  From a briefcase came a chart of cutting proportions similar to the one I put in my last blog posting. 

Tamura’s imagination was touched. He asked to see one of these ideal cut diamonds, looked at it, then remarked to Ken he thought it was beautiful.

The next question that Ken faced from Tamura, in my opinion, created a tiny niche in the history of diamond cutting that can be used as a kind of line of demarcation between the old way of looking at diamonds and the new one.  After all, Tamura’s curiosity had been stimulated by the science behind what Ken was telling him, it was no wonder Tamura assumed there was a tool or instrument Ken had with him that he could put the diamond in to demonstrate what the diamond did with light so he could see the truth for himself.  Did Ken have such an instrument was Tamura’s question.  Ken did not and found himself at a loss to explain why he could not build a bridge from the diagram of light moving in the diamond to the diamond itself.  Thinking of himself as easy prey to a salesman who could not completely demonstrate his product, Tamura reminded him that diamonds left him cold and told him his time was up.

On his way out Ken asked if he could return should he be able to produce such a device.  Tamura told him he would be delighted to see such an invention and Ken went off to invent.  He and experts he consulted with (in optics, plastics, manufacturing, physics, etc.) worked part-time for several years until one day they patented a device called the Firescope and trademarked its name, a name that has always seemed odd to me since, albeit it is a scope, it does not measure or demonstrate fire in a diamond as fire is the result of light being bent and broken down into colors.  It gives you a visual image of a diamond’s brilliance, not fire.  It would have made more sense to call it a Brilliancescope.

DIAMOND DEALER INVENTS SOMETHING

Nevertheless, Tamura was visited again and shown the Firescope and said the words from the beginning of this chapter: “With a shock it suddenly occurred to me that what we had here was a device that clearly and unmistakably showed how good or bad a diamond’s cut was.  All that was needed was the human eye.  All you had to do was look for yourself.” 

Ken did not have the deep pockets of Tamura.  Tamura did not have the stunning invention of Ken.  Tamura exclaimed there should be a Firescope in every jewelry store in the world so every consumer could really and truly see what they were buying.  He recalled how uncomfortable he felt buying his fiancé a diamond because he had to trust somebody he did not know and take his word for how he represented a diamond’s cutting, a diamond that was for sale for over 20 thousand dollars.  Ken heard “Firescope in every jewelry store in the world” as a symphony of cash registers playing his favorite melody.

CONTACTING DEBEERS

The two of them formed a partnership and decided to market the Firescope.  Tamura ordered plenty of them and kept them in boxes ready for the big rush once they were discovered.  Tamura contacted the international consortium of diamonds, DeBeers, to introduce the Firescope to them and, perhaps because of his social prominence, DeBeers agreed to see him.  A meeting was arranged with one of their representatives who said he felt the Firescope was among the most important gemological advances of his lifetime.

DeBeers has a booth at the three main jewelry trade shows held in America:  New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles.  In the middle of the 1980’s, Tamura and his partner were in the DeBeers booth at all three trade shows (it was Dallas then, not Las Vegas).  DeBeers sent out cover letters to the most important people in the industry world-wide expecting to have cutters and dealers lined up in deep lines to get their hands on the amazing new scope that told you EXACTLY how well (or how poorly) a diamond was cut.

IN JAPAN IT COMES FROM THE HEART

Anybody who has spent time in Japan has learned that you are expected to keep your word and be honest by the unwritten rules of the culture.  All acts are supposed to come from the heart, all products are supposed to be made with a heart-centered attitude.  Tamura told me he always assumed that a product such as a diamond, which costs thousands of dollars, would be treated with great reverence, so he was quite surprised to experience the disappointment of his many looks at diamonds and how they appeared in the Firescope to be just slapped together.  Even the ones in packets marked “ideal cut” or “perfect cut” appeared just plain awful in the scope.

THE FIRESCOPE IS UNFORGIVING

The lines of cutters and dealers that did form for the scopes disappeared quickly as word spread that this device would do nothing but show people everything the cutter did wrong when he cut the stone.  There were no takers.  Tamura became the first person in the history of diamonds to glimpse the truth about the way one of the most expensive commodities on earth was prepared for sale and it took him, and the rest of the entire jewelry industry, completely by surprise.

The idea of selling Firescopes to every jewelry store in the world evaporated and the business plan for the partners morphed into Tamura taking one single scope from diamond firm to diamond firm looking to amalgamate an inventory of diamonds that appeared perfectly cut in the Firescope.  “We will be the only people who can actually prove that we have an inventory of ideally cut diamonds.  All clients will be able to see for themselves,” Tamura explained to his partner as he embarked upon his journey into the wholesale and retail diamond centers of Tokyo.

HUNTING DOWN THE PERFECT CUT

Tamura did not care about the price.  He realized that what he was after was beyond rare; people would surely pay more, he reasoned, for what he could demonstrate with his scope.  With this in mind, he decided it did not matter whether he bought from a wholesaler, a retailer, a large department store, a cutter, an independent dealer.  Whoever could provide him with a diamond that appeared mostly red in his scope would get Tamura’s money. (White in the scope indicated light leakage in the diamond, a reflection of cutter error; where one saw red in the scope view of the diamond light was being “returned” to the viewer – as with a mirror.  White indicated problems, red indicated correct cutting.)

Tamura spent months meeting people in the diamond world, held out large amounts of cash for purchasing (Tamura was quite wealthy), the temptation that ordinarily gets instant results in buying markets of all types of merchandise all over the world.  The truth is that one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the history of Japan came up empty-handed.  NOBODY HAD EVEN ONE DIAMOND CUT RIGHT.  He told me he looked at 50 thousand diamonds.  What was happening during this uncharted, unprecedented expedition into Tokyo’s diamond inventories was that a genius from outside the industry, with no vested interest in the way diamonds are cut, with no reason to want cutters to save weight in cutting to please the accountancy divisions of their companies, this genius was building a mental databank of diamond OBJECTIVE observations in a medium that had never been explored, a medium that allowed the first real look at the effects of a cutter’s attempts to harness the light power of the crystal he or she began with.  At the end of a few months, even though his inventory safe was not filling up with great diamonds to sell, his mind was expanding exponentially with thoughts that would lead to the first diamond cut perfectly in the 500 year history of diamond cutting.

GO TO AMERICA, YOU’LL SURELY FIND IT THERE

Those diamond dealers who could refrain from becoming defensive about their product shared with Tamura that the problem might be that he was combing the wrong market.  They suggested he go to America to find the perfect diamonds he sought as it was known in the industry that the three firms in the world who claimed to sell only “ideal cuts” were companies whose names all started with K:  Kaplan, Keiger, Keppie.

Tamura had no idea which company to pursue, so he asked around for any information he might be given.  He found out that one company was based in New York, one in St. Louis, and one in Pittsburgh.  With absolutely nothing else to go by than this shred of information, Tamura, being an avid football fan, picked the J. C. Keppie Company, because the Pittsburgh Steelers were his favorite team.  He spent many days at this company looking at all 12 thousand of their diamonds, individually, in his Firescope.

THREE MAGIC STONES

At this place he ALMOST came up empty.  He went through their inventory starting with their important, expensive ones, deducing that the company would take especial care with the ones that cost many times what luxury cars sold for.  Not one of those was cut right.  He started systematically looking at diamonds under a carat, going through smaller and smaller ones until they were bringing him bags of 500 diamonds containing the little side stones people often refer to as “chips” in jewelry.  He went through several of these until he happened upon 3 diamonds, each one weighing .03 carat, that made a perfect reflection pattern in the Firescope indicating that every facet was symmetrically placed and that beams of light had perfect paths to follow in and out of these diamonds.

Sitting next to the other little diamonds, they practically jumped off the table they were so beautiful.

At the end of his research at the diamond facility in Pittsburgh, Tamura was in a position to conclude something that also shocked the diamond trade, to come to a conclusion that made the famous American diamond cutting company introspect, first itself as a company, then the cutting methods and practices it had absorbed through industry osmosis.  Tamura expressed his conclusions to the company’s owner this way: “When a company such as yours, dedicated to making every diamond be cut ideally, attempts to make a perfect cut, it happens by accident 1 time in 4000.”

Tamura showed the owner the three special diamonds he found in their inventory, left his Firescope with them and said he wanted them to cut him a complete inventory of diamonds this way, intentionally, not by accident.  They agreed to get started right away as they saw Tamura could turn out to be their very best client.  They struggled for months and finally concluded that it was not possible to deliberately cut diamonds the way the three little ones were cut. 

They were unable to do it because diamonds had grain inside them, invisible grain, that was like the grain in wood.  Working with the grain works well; working against the grain, things don’t go the way you want.  In diamonds working against the grain is impossible.  You cannot simply put a facet wherever you want it, facing any direction you choose.  You MUST work within the restrictions of the grain pattern of each diamond.  This one fact is what kept the diamond industry from succeeding in making diamonds cut symmetrically for 500 years. 

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS PERFECT ENOUGH?

Keppie gave up and told Tamura it was not financially feasible to continue the project and that they felt their diamonds were perfect enough.

As difficult as it is to pinpoint particular events or details that are the key elements in knowledge growth, consciousness expansion or the beginnings of movements, this event is clearly one of the catalytic key events that forever changed the industry’s approach to diamond cutting.  Tamura laughed and asked what the company’s owner would say if his doctor declared his wife was “pregnant enough”.  There was laughter on both ends of the phone, I am told.  This funny joke actually demonstrates the way the Japanese culture views perfection.  It is a yes/no proposition.  Something is either perfect or it is not.  There is no “perfect enough” when the impulse to manufacture comes from the heart.

Tamura decided at that moment to open his own diamond factory and make it a requirement of the factory to only allow Firescope perfect diamonds into the inventory, nothing short of that.  Tamura was able to comprehend the rarity of what he sought through his own personal expeditions into diamond wallets in scores of firms’ inventories, but he had yet to learn exactly why this was so, why it was so rare. 

In my next chapter I will talk about the process he began when he opened his factory and how I came to meet him and help him revolutionize the jewelry industry.