Authenticity in the Age of the Fake - Issue 42: Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/authenticity-in-the-age-of-the-fake
The announcement of synthetic diamonds in 1955 was met with the same kind of alarm and skepticism that greeted claims to have made alchemical gold in the Middle Ages. Could these “fake” gems, created by a team at the General Electric research laboratories in Schenectady, New York really match the genuine article? One anonymous critic from California captured a widespread suspicion in blunt terms when he wrote to GE, saying: You can’t make real diamonds for they are nature grown. You can’t make gold; no one can. They dig gold out of the ground and also diamonds. But no one can make them with a machine. That is just a lot of bull. Yet what if it were true that diamonds really can be manufactured? When GE revealed the discovery, the stock of the De Beers diamond cartel in South Africa, which (...)