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Show DIAMONDS MADE FIRST BY U' SCIENTIST Milady's sparkling diamond ring seems destined to take on an artificial arti-ficial glow. Recent scientific experiments ex-periments placing ordinary carbon under terrific pressure and high temperatures have yielded as much as one-third carat of diamonds in a single test. An early pioneer and actually the first man in history to artificially arti-ficially make a diamond is Samuel S. Kistler, dean of the University of Utah college of engineering. As chief of research for a New England manufacturer just prior to World War II, Kistler led the way to the first successful synthesis syn-thesis of diamonds. Kistler's diamonds dia-monds were about the size of grains of sand. Since the initial discovery, sev- eral research laboratories have improved im-proved the diamond making pro- ( cess until diamonds actually larger larg-er than the average worn on the female hand may someday be produced. pro-duced. Kistler's first diamond came after five men worked five years performing some 13,000 experiments. experi-ments. The experimental combination combina-tion which "struck" diamonds in ordinary carbon was a pressure- of 670,000 pounds per square inch and a temperature of 900 degrees centigrade. cen-tigrade. Why has man been so eager to make synthetic diamonds? According Accord-ing to Kistler, "Besides the immediate im-mediate desire of cracking the South African monopoly, scientists have just wanted to see if they could do it meet nature's challenge chal-lenge to duplicate one of her choicest products." |