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.