Paving Sidewalks with Blue Topaz

©Copyright 2014: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

Surprise Phone Call

“Good morning, Richard.  I just bought 6 million carats of white topaz and I need to get them turned blue.  If you can help me, I will pay you 20 cents per carat.”

What a phone call it was to receive early one morning in the spring of the mid 1980’s from a German precious gemstone supplier of mine in Idar-Oberstein, a man who supplied me some of the unusually well cut colored gemstones I was known for in the gemstone business.  Idar is not far from the French border, near Trier, a place where I once marveled at automobiles driving on a bridge over a river that Cesar used to cross by chariot.  Same bridge.

German Town Vital Link to Gem History

Many centuries ago Idar-Oberstein became the center in the civilized world of finely carved and polished agate because the local hills were filled with high quality agate deposits, the Nahe River runs through the valley creating a constant supply of flowing water to power the large, rotating cutting surfaces used by the pre-formers, cutters and polishers of the day and, well, this is Germany we are talking about, home to many of the great industrial barons of precision.

People everywhere began to want the ultra-precisely carved book-ends, beads, marbles, columns, belt-buckles, brooches, hat-pins, gems cut en cabochon and all the rest of the litany of products the Idar-Obersteiners provided the world.  For several generations fortunes were made by the agate fashioners in the myriad villages surrounding the gem polishing center of Idar.  The industrial revolution revved up the demand for

With huge rotating cutting wheels in front of them, to stay
comfortable during a work day, the cutter lay down in
front of the wheel to grind his agates

product beyond the ability of the local hills to keep up and they finally dried up.

Many of the descendants of the original merchants of Idar decided to send scouts to the new world in search of more raw material to keep the factories running at home.  It taxes the imagination to contemplate what it must have seemed like to the Idar merchants facing the extinction of their multi-generation existence, merchants descended from a culture in which people who switch careers are considered reckless.  They must have fretted and worried endlessly through the long and depressing German winters where one of my business associates told me he was accustomed to going 8 weeks at a time without seeing the sun.

Gems based on beryllium are
called Beryls. Included are aqua,
emerald, morganite, red beryl et al

How serendipitously the apprehensive merchants were rewarded when the scouts got to Brazil and found untouched fields and began mining the beryllium-based gemstones (emerald, chrysoberyl, aquamarine, morganite, heliodor, green beryl), 

Natural topaz colors

topazes of all colors from white to gold and pink.  And huge deposits of tourmaline crystals, amethysts, rulitated quartz, clear quartz and many, many more of the gem species kept surfacing for the legendary gem field explorers from the Old World. 

Brazilian alexandrite, the color-
changing chrysoberyl, very
rare and valuable gemstone

Old World Rescued by the New

The face of Idar-Oberstein changed almost overnight.  Gemstones were being cut in many places already, but nobody brought to the cutting milieu the high plane of consciousness that German industrialists imbued into the cutting of fine gemstones.  As more and more of

Antique platinum tiara set with
Santa Maria Aquamarine
of museum quality, cut in
Idar-Oberstein

the old agate firms sent their master cutters to school to learn to facet gems that were transparent, the jewelry of the world purchased by the rich and powerful began to appear more and more beautiful as the gemstones set into what are today’s famous jewelry antiques and legendary pieces were cut and polished for beauty in a style that the cutters of Idar-Oberstein were the heroes and masters of.

Antique platinum necklace set
with Rubellite tourmalines
cut in Idar-Oberstein

Over the decades gemstone “handlers” (as the Germans call them) who travel the world to purchase cut gems for sale and provide rough gems for cutters, came to see Idar-Oberstein as the world center for precisely cut Brazilian and African gemstone types.  Rough dealers of the finest gem crystals found anywhere on earth would get to Idar as quickly as possible with their show pieces knowing that the cutting companies in Idar were always flush with cash.

This would explain how it was possible for a German cutter like the one who called me that spring morning to come across several million carats of gems right there at his factory, purchase them with cash and later pick up the phone to call me.  I am glad I was there to take the call.

Cubic Zirconium Terrified the Industry

It was only a few years before this that the diamond industry suddenly felt threatened by the manufacturing of imitation diamonds called cubic zirconium.  Because they crystallize in a way similar to natural zircon, they disperse light like diamonds do and emit flashes of color like diamonds do.  They look so similar in jewelry that many experts have been fooled by “Cubics”, or “Cubic Z”, as people referred to them when I was in the gem industry. Thieves have used cubic zirconia to switch for diamonds.  In other words, something that cost 50 cents has often been “traded” for something that cost a jeweler 10 thousand dollars, or more.  And I have seen cases where it took the jeweler weeks, or months, to find out what had happened.

Gemologists (scientists of the gem industry) immediately went to work to invent instruments that could be on jewelry store counters, but could easily separate diamond from cubic and, in short order, it was easy to tell one from the other.  The industry breathed a sigh of relief on one front, but they had to face the reality of a new market of diamond-look-alikes that many people would buy because they just could not justify diamond costs.  No small market, Cubic was available in any size or shape one could want, or any size or shape of any diamond one had seen.  (Once when I visited Helmut Swarovsky at his factory in Austria, he told me they were cutting approximately 2 billion cubics per year there)

Is this a cubic zirconium or a diamond? PLEASE
COMMENT ON THIS BLOG POST saying if
you think this is a real diamond or a cheap
imitation.  For fun, of course.

 Manufacturers of jewelry, ones who sell to department store chains or TV jewelry programs in huge volume, must develop ulcers worrying about supply as orders pile up on their desks because gemstones do not come from gemstone trees with predictable crops of gem crystals.  They come from mines that produce for awhile and peter out.  Large manufacturers dream about gems that they can get as many of as they want in all the sizes and shapes they need for their production, any time they want.  For manufacturers of lower cost jewelry, cubic zirconium was not considered a threat as it seemed to be to the diamond industry.  On the contrary.  It was, instead, considered a dream that bloomed into abundance and stability of supply.

Those who keep an eye on such things in the jewelry industry began to write about the invasion of synthetics and substitutes into the jewelry stores of the world and how it had not made real gems drop in value.  If anything, the opposite was true to those to whom it mattered that they had “real” things, not man-made ones, in their jewelry.  As long as there was a way to distinguish between one and the other, instead of one market killing another, the original market, diamonds, continued and the new market, cubics, established itself and grew alongside diamonds.

Hunger for a Cheap and Plentiful Blue Gem

This consciousness born from the lessons of the cubic zirconium miracle created a hunger among manufacturers for the same thing to happen in other colors.  In plentiful and cheap supply were garnets, amethysts, citrines, peridots, moonstones, agates, malachite, lapis, opal, in other words, semi-precious birthstone type gems.  In the blue color there were sapphire and aquamarine readily available.  These gem types are significantly more expensive than the ones in the above list.  In sapphire, there is very little regular supply except in smaller sizes.

Linear Accelerator, the type of device that bombards
subject materials with electrons, which turn topaz a baby
blue color, sold in the trade as Sky Blue topaz.

Mad scientists went to work on the supply problem, combing the natural world for materials and experimenting in laboratories for what did what to all gem types.  Heating, cooling, melting and reconstituting, zapping with electricity, radiation, all manner of courses were pursued while the hunt was on for the universally desirable, easily obtainable gemstone that could come from a nearly endless supply.  At some point, white topaz, being that it was extremely plentiful, became an object of research in the laboratories run by nuclear experts and directors of linear accelerators because it was learned that white topaz exposed to electron bombardment found in the linear accelerator turns a soft, baby blue color and white topaz bombarded with neutrons in a nuclear reactor turns a deeper, grayish blue known as London blue.

It was the London blue color that the German cutter wanted me to turn his 6 million carats of white topaz.

London blue in calibrated sizes had just begun to appear on the wholesale market. (Calibrated sizes are the standard, pre-measured sizes used by jewelry manufacturers: examples would be 8 x 6 millimeter oval, 5 x 3 oval, 6 mm round, 12 x 10 emerald cut, etc.)  I was intrigued, purchased some from a cutting company and set off to show them to my retail jeweler customers.  They were an immediate big hit and I sold out the first day.  My price to the jewelers was 50 dollars per carat.  

This number will become more important later in this story.

When I learned that German cutting firms were interested in topaz, I sensed there was a huge market about to develop that would be hungry for supply.  I had no idea how huge it would become, nor how lightning fast.  I asked my supplier why he had called ME about this matter and he told me it was because I was his client in the San Francisco bay area and he was “positive” the treatment was being done here.  I agreed to take on the project and we made our “gentlemen’s agreement” so typical of the precious gem industry, an agreement, being verbal, unenforceable in a court, but enforceable by the death penalty to the reputation of one who violates such an agreement in the gem world.

Finding the Nuclear Needle in a Haystack

Off I set to find the place in the San Francisco area where mad masters of nuclear alchemy restructured the chemical structure of topaz so that there was control over light absorption, converting the material from a colorless substance into a crystal of blue color.  The first type of blue topaz, Sky blue, had been commercially available for many months, articles had been written about it, and it was universally known that a linear accelerator was required for that color.  I knew not to start with the linears.

I went right to the top:  the NRC.  Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  I think I can fairly say that I got the “run-around” of a lifetime, being transferred from one division to another, from one vague, noncommittal voice to another until it became obvious this was not a subject I was going to get anywhere with.  I tried places I knew had nuclear reactors and found many I did not know about.  I struck out with each one.  I exhausted the bay area quickly, called places further and further away until I began to wonder if I was up against an invisible barrier of some kind.

Weeks went by and I got nowhere.  I spent hours every day following dead-end leads.  My German supplier got more and more antsy as time passed with no measurable results.  I made it a point to ask everybody I spoke with in the gem trade if they had any idea about this.  I soon learned that it was taboo to ask anybody who was big in the topaz business. 

In my research project I met the son of the man who invented London blue topaz.  I knew that he was not having his material treated in America, but in London, hence its name.  He would not tell me anything except that his father was certain the end of the beautiful era of the blue topaz business was about to unfold as cut-throat enterprises entered the business to compete.  His father had enjoyed the exploding business all to himself for long enough not to have to care, the son told me.  They made an enviable amount of money during the initial rush.

One night I was in a jewelry store in Southern California doing a colored gemstone show open to the public with some other gemstone dealers whose inventories did not overlap so there was no competition amongst us.  One of them had one sip of champagne too many and his tongue began to wag just a little too loosely and, to my amazement, out slipped my missing clue.  A place I would never have thought of in a million years.  At that same event was a gentleman who was also trying to discover where the nuclear treatment was occurring and was attempting to do for Bangkok cutters what I was attempting to do for the German ones.  Neither of us would let squeak out of us even the least significant details of our searching.

A few days later that fellow called me from an airport to tell me he had enjoyed his breakthrough and was ready to start dumping topaz into the reactor for the Thai cutting firms.  I could hear the omnipresent loudspeaker-talk in the background and was not paying much attention to it until I heard them say the name of the airport.  I looked at my map and saw that his location and the clue that slipped off the drunken lips of the other dealer at the gem show supported each other. 

The Breakthrough I Sought

Later I called the facility I thought least likely to know anything about this, got put through to the head of the reactor, asked him if he treated topaz.  There was a pause, then a cautious answer something like: “We neutron bombard some orthorhombic aluminum silicates.”  I wondered to myself at the time what had happened to “Yes” and “No”, and why everybody was so vague and mysterious about this particular subject.  Since I could only see the top of the iceberg here, I did not yet know how many billions of dollars were at stake beneath the surface where gem “players” with enormous fortunes moved around like eerie shadows on foggy nights to cut their Leviathan deals.

I told the fellow that I had several million carats of topaz that needed to be bombarded and turned London blue.  Boy!!  Did that change the tenor of the conversation!  I went from feeling like a persona non grata to an honored guest in a few seconds.  He invited me to visit him at the reactor and I started right away to plan the trip there. Obstacles began to pile up in front of me almost immediately, so many, that at the end of the journey I began to wonder if there were such things as actual “signs” from the universe encouraging one, or warning one of things to come in the midst of all the events.  

From the difficulty getting airline reservations to hotel and car rental difficulties in the beginning, the scene deteriorated terribly on the first flight.  I had flown around the world many, many times before I got on this plane and had never experienced anything like the wind shear our plane ran into.  With no warning the plane dropped like an elevator with the cable cut loose…….for a LONG time.  People not strapped in were injured, including flight attendants.  Food flew everywhere, people screamed.  I was sure this was my last moment alive when, SNAP, the plane pulled out of the free-fall and resumed its normal course and speed.  Shortly after that we landed and I was NEVER so happy to deplane.

The next leg of the journey was a couple of hours later, so I went to an airport restaurant, had a meal, strolled around and around the airport and watched the weather deteriorate.  Winds began to blow really hard.  I looked out the porthole where our propeller plane was waiting for us to board in about half an hour and noticed the plane was blowing around so hard they had strapped its wheels with big cables to hold it in place.  Having just suffered a terrifying flight, I could not imagine myself getting on a plane that was shaking and vibrating at the end of cables to take off in gale force winds.  I asked the lady at the desk if that was the plane we were set to get on.  She looked at me and smiled, then said: “Seeing is believing”.

I told her I was not going to get on that little toy airplane in a monster storm, that I wanted to change my flight plans.  She found me a flight later on a real jet and I sat down to wait and watch people board the pathetic little airplane I was convinced was doomed to crash.  Somebody watching these things must have finally realized the wind blowing was not some romantic honeymoon breeze and they canceled the flight on the tiny plane with the lawn-mower motor.

For a few hours I sat and waited until we finally boarded the jet that took me to where the reactor was, where the director of the topaz project was there to meet me.  Still gripped with fear from my flying experiences, I asked if I could just go to my hotel and unwind until the next morning.

Staring into the Nuclear Blue

The characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactoris due to Cherenkov radiation.
It is named after Soviet scientist Pavel Alekseyevich
Cherenkov, the 1958 Nobel Prize winner who was the first to detect it experimentally.

The next day, bright and early, I stood at the top of a catwalk looking down into the pool of water in the reactor, turned a deep blue color from the glow of the reacting.  I thought of the pictures I had seen of nuclear weapons testing, flashed back to my childhood memories of air-raid sirens going off in our neighborhoods for practice drills where we were supposed to duck and cover to prepare for nuclear attack, recalled every movie I had ever seen about the end of the world destroyed by nuclear war, contemplated nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, and then chuckled to myself for all the decades of thinking that scary word “nuclear” as carrying 10 tons of negative semantic weight fraught with danger, a worrisome concept, was switched around on its tracks to suddenly become a word associated with vanity, jewelry, gem dealers, manufacturing breakthroughs.  As I looked around me at the unreadable instrumentation and flickering LED’s, I felt I had been swept away into a science fiction dream.

I was taken to the storage room where there were little mountains of topaz turned London blue waiting to be checked for radioactivity.  As it was explained to me, the gems I saw were not radioactive enough to be dangerous, but more radioactive than what the NRC would allow to be placed in public distribution.  “You can pick them up and hold them,” they told me, “but you would not want to wear any of these every day for 20 years.  Not until they have cooled down completely.”

The finer pieces of London Blue
topaz came out the reactor this color

I surprised myself with my interest in all the extremely high technology I was in the middle of as question after question came to my mind and the super-minds around me rattled off explanations like college professors. 

The answer to one of the questions I asked remains in my mind and an image I formed comes back again and again in my head.  My question came from a feeling I had that all the technology was being used for such an odd purpose: to change the color of one of the most prevalent crystals available on our planet so that people who would like an aquamarine, but cannot afford one, can get completely decked out in blue gems.  I asked if there were any good besides profit coming from what the lab was doing with nuclear energy.  “Oh yes,” an enthusiastic professor type blurted out.

Years later, I now wish I could have recorded what he said after that.  It was so detail rich and scientifically insightful that I was spellbound as he spoke, but only sketchy details remain in my mind today.  A celluloid type fiber is placed into the reactor and held exactly in place while neutrons are allowed to bombard its surface.  What he told me was that neutrons travel in perfectly straight lines and are tiny, tiny, but have a presence.  They pass through the material that has been placed in the reactor leaving the tiniest holes ever artificially created.  The material placed into the reactor is, then, converted into the most important blood filter ever created as it has the capacity to filter microscopic organisms never before possible.  I gained a kind of respect absent in my thinking until then.

If you Test Positive, your Life Changes Radically

As my thoughts drifted away into medical daydreams, I was told it was time to leave that part of the reactor and go back to the offices.  On the way out, we came to a locked gate.  The gate would not open unless your hands, placed on some metallic mold of human hands, passed whatever radiation test the mechanism gave you.  I was not prepared for the waves of feelings and emotion that began to gyrate through me as my imagination ran wild with scenes of red lights flashing, bells ringing, hot soapy anti-radioactivity showers, medicines, radiation burns………..   And then, click, the door opened, and we walked to the offices as if nothing had happened.

The professor types left and the director and I stayed to talk business.  I could see this was the place to send the white specimens of crystalized aluminum silicate.

Radioactive Dust in the Air

I headed back home knowing I would be back and had much more to learn.  I contacted the fellow in Idar who was eagerly awaiting my breakthrough, as was I.  He decided to begin the cutting and calibrating process so he could send me already cut gems for treating.  His choice was to do that, or to send the crystals themselves for treatment and cut the gems afterwards.  His reasoning was that, with several million carats of gem cutting material that had been exposed to radioactivity being calibrated in his factory, there was bound to be a constant amount of radioactive dust in the air.  Almost every cutting firm in Idar has its cutting facility on its premises in buildings built centuries ago.  Hence, not only his employees, but his family would be exposed to radioactive dust.  It was an easy decision for him to make to send the already cut gems.

Beginning the Production

He set about to begin his production making his preforms.  Preforms are the first state of shape a crystal becomes before actual finish facets are applied to its surface.  They are quite roughly hewn compared to their more symmetrical finished product counterparts: cut and polished gems.  There are two steps required to get to the preform stage.  The first one is the hammering and the second is the orienting.  In a factory, it is critical to the survival of the company that these two steps are accomplished by people who really know what they are doing and care about it.

In step one, the “goods” (rough crystals) are hammered on to separate the gem

Preformed treated topaz crystals roughly formed for the cutter to begin

quality material from the useless host material the gem specimen is contained by.  Once the host material is removed, an age-old concept of maximum weight retention in cutting is applied in the next step by the person who “orients” the crystal for pre-forming.  This is because gemstones are sold by weight.  The more weight that the cutting firm can retain on each gem cut, the higher the net profit is for the company.  When there are amateurs doing either of these two steps, in the balance lies whether the company makes any profit at all.

The German cutting company prepared and oriented, then preformed several thousand pieces of calibrated white topaz, packaged them up and sent them to me.  I inventoried everything, repacked them and sent them to the reactor.  It took longer than I thought for the first German shipment to arrive from Idar.  I sent a message asking if everything was going all right.  The answer was another experience infusion into my gemological database.  Because topaz is a schistose type material that forms in parallel layers.  When they oriented the crystals for cutting, they ended up with the large facet on the top of each gem (called the TABLE facet).  When they began to apply the polish to the table surface, pieces of the parallel layers began to peel away right before the eyes of the cutters and scatter all over the cutting shop.  It was necessary to redo the preforms by tilting them slightly off their horizontal axis in order that the tables of the gems were not parallel to the crystal layers.

The Next Lesson at the Reactor

After the gems had been in the reactor a few weeks, I called to talk about going to see the goods and bringing some of the material home with me.  When I got there, the piles of blue topaz had turned into mountain ranges.  There were millions and millions of carats sitting, waiting to be “releasable” by the standards of the NRC.  When I entered the reactor area, there was a book into which I had to sign.  My curiosity nudged me to look through the book to see who was coming to the reactor.  I turned back a page, another page and another.  A name jumped off the page and a spasmodic pulse of adrenalin scurried along my central nervous system bringing fear to my heart.  Here was the name of the person with a reputation for entering a business enormously, cutting the prices substantially, taking the business and running with it until the pony finally dropped in its tracks, then off to another gemstone type.  He had done this with two gem types already and had quite a reputation.

Now that 50 dollars per carat price I mentioned earlier has a context to go into.  Because this major player had deposited his millions of carats recently, I knew there was a grace period that would be short lived, one of price status quo.  It was just a matter of time before the bottom fell out of the blue topaz business, I told myself.  It took a few months, but I watched the price of topaz go from that 50 dollar per carat mark all the way down to 1 dollar.

Not all Topaz the Same

“How much London blue topaz can I pick up today and ship to my German customer?” was the question I came to the reactor with.  The professors came back.  We all sat while I was delivered an “insider” explanation of what was occurring in the topaz world.  The lecture was about topaz becoming radioactive during neutron bombardment, the half-life of the resultant radioactive centers in the gems and what made some topaz more radioactive than others.  Chemically pure topaz, it was explained to me, does not stay radioactive for very much time at all.  There is very little chemically pure anything anywhere, so very little topaz they put into the reactor was ready to wear the next day, so to speak.

The element in topaz that causes any particular topaz gem to become radioactive is cesium.  The more cesium there is in any stone, the longer it stays radioactive.  Clear topaz, at that time, occurred on earth in massive quantities in Brazil, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.  Sri Lankan topaz has the least cesium, in general, while Nigerian has the most, in general.  They told me that my client’s topaz was all Nigerian and that a small amount was available now, but the bulk of it would not be coming from the reactor for some months, and that some of it would never be releasable.

Meanwhile, people who had sent Sri Lankan topaz, they said, were getting shipments after 14 days of cool down time and the longest waits with Sri Lankan were a few months.  Brazilian material was somewhere in between.  In fact, they told me, there were similar amounts of topaz in reactors in foreign countries (they cited Brazil as an example) where they do not have stringent NRC type regulations, places where topaz is coming out of the reactor “hot” so that the companies who invested their millions into white topaz, do not have to wait to get their return on their money.  The wait time definitely became an issue.

Gemologists came back into the picture from their heroic efforts to distinguish cubic zirconia from diamond so that they could help stop radioactive topaz from coming into the United States.  In a few months the NRC had educated American customs officials and provided the equipment necessary to check topaz shipments coming in with dealers or in containers being mailed into the USA.  The NRC regulations for radioactivity in gemstones began to ratchet themselves tighter and tighter, each time causing it to take longer to get shipments of topaz.

Jumping into the Business

Pretty soon word was out that I was a topaz treater and several German companies asked me to treat their topaz.  I formed a partnership with a German friend and we began treating topaz in much larger quantities, including topaz for his family’s firm.  Seeing the writing on the wall, or perhaps I should say from the signature log book at the reactor, my partner and I decided to purchase Sri Lankan topaz, calibrate it, treat it, and offer it for sale before the price got down so low that you would lose money doing such a thing.

We paid 80 cents per carat for the calibrated topaz pieces and 20 cents per carat for the reactor’s treatment.  Before we knew it, we had plenty of topaz to sell to smaller manufacturers and the cash began to flow.  The money from the treating company also began to flow.  It felt like being Rumpelstiltskin.  The price had already begun to fall before the man with the destructive reputation got his hands on any topaz, but only to about 20 dollars or so per carat.  I decided to take a trip around the world to sell topaz, which at the time was something like taking one dollar bills and trading them for twenties.

I loaded up the biggest brief case I could carry with several pounds of topaz and headed to Germany.  With the records I was carrying with me it was possible to know how many stones I had (thousands and thousands), what sizes and shapes they were and how much they all weighed.  From that the Germans in Frankfurt customs put a stamp and seal on the box, asked me for 14% of the value of all the topaz I was carrying in cash.  They used my records to determine the value of the goods I was carrying and asked me for an amount that was about all the cash I had with me to pay my expenses on a trip to several countries.  I was unprepared, but gave over my money and drove to Idar’s custom’s office.  The Frankfurt people had already sent my goods ahead of me and the customs people in Idar were waiting to bring me up to speed on how to make my sales in Idar, a stack of forms that each person who bought anything from me HAD to bring to the customs office, no exceptions. On my way out of the country, I had to come back to that office, they would check all the paperwork from the people I had sold to and refund me the cash I gave as my deposit in Frankfurt less the amount they were going to tax my customers on my sales in Germany who were required to pay a 14% VAT type tax on imported gemstones.

Permission to Leave NOT Granted

I went from dealer to dealer and found a tremendous amount of interest, sold quite a bit and went back to pack up at my hotel to prepare for my flight to Asia the next day (a Saturday).  So, at the end of the day Friday, I was back in the Idar customs office with my invoices to show what I had sold.  The official I spoke with looked at everything, then, with a firmly stern face, told me one of the customers I sold to had failed to bring the paperwork and pay the 14% tax.  “No problem,” I told him.  I offered to pay the tax myself.  This suggestion not only was unacceptable, it brought anger to the face of this bureaucrat’s otherwise scary face, who told me I could not leave Germany until the customer came to the office, signed the papers and paid his 14%.  Period.

Scary face sent me to an office where there was a telephone I was to use to see if I could get my customer to come at once to clear up the mess I was in, a mess that was beginning to seem far too complex for me to absorb the ramifications of.  My last hope, then, was to get through to the customer, which I was able to do.  He remained politely quiet while I explained my situation and all but begged him to come free me from the constraints of the bureaucratic dictator I was on the other end of a delicate entanglement with.  “I will take care of it Monday,” he was saying as he put his phone down, to my great dismay.

On the way back down the stairs from the little phone room I had a craving to be in a “normal” social situation in Germany, the kind where happy people enjoy a great beer together.  My favorite German beer, called Bitburger, entered my mind and stayed there as what must have been part of the denial stage I had entered about what I was about to face with the gorilla bureaucrat who had the capacity to ensnarl my travel itinerary with complications that would require a whole host of airline and hotel changes and phone calls.  I was seeing in my mind the very famous German advertising slogan: “Bitte ein bit”  These three words are among the top few most long-lasting, far reaching slogan words in German advertising history.  A brilliant play of words, so simple, yet one that runs so very deep right into the heart of German beer drinkers.  It plays on the fact that the first syllable of the beer known as Bitburger is the same as the first syllable of the word that means Please in German: Bitte.  It is so powerful a company motto with its Teutonic, monosyllabic punch, that almost every German has heard it.

I opened the door back into the room where the bureaucrat’s angry eyes met mine as I stepped self-consciously back up to the customs window.  I told the official my customer had repeated he would be in on Monday to settle the account.  With that same steely, unbending stare he told me that was not good enough and I realized I was at a dead end.  Thinking I no longer had anything to lose because I was just plain stuck, I saw some humor here, saw the bureaucrat as an innocent victim of stringent rules that put one in a stringent mood to enforce.  I grinned and told him that it was Friday, time for a good German beer.  In a thousand years he probably never would have expected me to blurt out:  “Bitte ein bit”.  But I did.

His iceberg of a countenance suddenly melted, a smile appeared and then he burst out laughing, stamped my paperwork and told me Monday would be fine, that I could go catch my plane.  He counted out all my money in German currency and sent me on my way, still smiling.

I caught my plane and repeated the topaz selling experience in more countries and, finally, it was time to come home.  I was in customs for 7 hours.  When I opened my briefcase to show my topaz and my records of sales in the countries I had visited, the agent would go to some manual he or she had and try to peg me into a category, but was not able to do so for some reason or another.  Next to me in the first line I was in was a gentleman from China with 4 wheeling sample cases the size of small automobiles full of clothing.  This was several decades ago and relations with China were just warming up, customs and immigration manuals were being rewritten and, as a result, they didn’t know what to do with him either.  We would both be sent to some next person in a different office who was, like the one before, unable to find the data necessary to fill out his or her form and “clear” us.

When the fellow from China would step up to the window, since he could not speak English, the agent would announce on the loudspeaker that a Chinese translator was needed at his window.  Nobody would show up.  After awhile the agent would try to explain the situation.  They all did the same thing:  they acted as if they thought that speaking volume would compensate for lack of ability to speak English.  They would talk louder when they saw they were not being understood.  The agent would write out a number of the next office and draw a little map to where it was.  I was given the map without any explanation, but we both kept being sent to the same place.  After several hours of this, the Chinese man, having to cart around with him sample cases that practically needed a tractor to pull them, after flying who knows how many hours, intimidated like a mouse by a cat in an alien environment of what to him must have seemed like linguistic jibberish, began to cry.  I felt embarrassed that such a thing could happen to a foreigner visiting my country.  Of course, I was not faring much better myself.

“Mr. von Sternberg?” I looked up to see a fellow motioning me to the window, now 7 hours after I first arrived at customs.  I was struggling to stay awake, already jet-lagged when I had landed and dreaded another visit to a customs window.  When I got there I was asked if I knew the country of origin of the gemstones I had with me.  Sri Lanka I told him.  “Ah, then there is no duty, you are free to go”.

Jumping Back out of the Business

I knew I was in the process of playing beat the clock until the topaz dam broke and they began giving it away as door prizes.  My partner and I made a plan to “dump” the topaz we had left at a price that we could get paid on the spot (no having to give terms to the buyers) and exit the business as the price pressure began to mount.  More and more topaz appeared at gem shows, in dealer’s briefcases, in catalogs, at the reactor; then one day the huge inventory of the worrisome gem dealer hit the market and the price began to tumble as we rode the price elevator down.  Like most people, I sold off the last of our inventory for 1 dollar per carat and left the business.

What remains with me to this day is the image in my mind of the HUGE quantities of blue topaz that entered the world’s gemstone pipeline to end up as earrings, necklaces, rings, brooches, tiaras and tennis bracelets.  Enough topaz to pave sidewalks with.