PAINTED DIAMONDS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1110, 10 August 1883, Page 4

PAINTED DIAMONDS.

The fnuid in precious stones furnishes a curious confirmation of the law i f chromatic Jam! an illustration of hakespe.ue’s saying To giH refined gold, tojpaint the lily. A limit six momha ago the owner of a magnificent gem, which ho had supposed to be a Brazilian diamond of'ln first waiter,! psuddentlv it reduced to about ore tif'h its value by being acoide tally washed w'th soapsuds, This simple process revealed i s true character as a yellow African diamond of inferior grade. This trick, which was originally played in Paris, has been reproduced in A men : and ir, is rnmoured a that a single firm was thus swindled out of many thou sands of dollars without being able to detect the perpetrator of the fraud A case ot the sort is now in the New Haven courts, being tried by Judge Iteming, some of the i arlicn. lais of which (as given by the Scientific American) may ne of interes', and sei ve to put persons on their guard against wlmt is r ally an ingenioi s deception. Jacob Nopel, a manufai* taring jeweller in that city, had several diamonds, apparently of great value, which he disposed of by an agent to Mr Edward Engel, a diamond broker of 17 years’ experience. The gem were faultless, but the low price set on them awoke suspicion that they were either stolen or spurious. Several 10-'-al dealers examined them, using a microscope for the purpose, and pronounced them fine old mine diamonds and worth five or six times their price Mr Engel then took them to New York and exhibited them to Messrs Heller and Bardeli, importers and deale s in precious stontjs, who were also deceived by the appearance of the gems until the owner mentioned his suspicions. Mr Heller, remembering to have heard of a new process of painting diamonds, took one of the studs, e tiraated to lie wor.h from £2OO to £3OO, washed it in soap-suds, and found it to be a cheap African diamond worth perhaps L3O. The rest of the set proved to have been tampered with in a similar manner, 'tin returning to New Haven, Mr Engel sought redress through the •courts, and probably will get it. The explanation is as follows : —The common diamonds are naturally a honey-yellow. On dipping one of them for a few minutes in an aqueous solution of aniline violet, and then letting it. dry, it will be found that, while the lustre remains unimpaired, the ■colour is changed from yellow to fine *teel-l,lne usually observable oniy in ■the best ot atones. The two colours, vellow and violet, it will be noticed, «re complementarit s, and on blending produce the biil iant result described Aniline is easily removed by au application of soap suds, the water feeing ■tinged, not violet, but green, while the ■diamonds regains its originally yellow hue.