The Red Brick Times

Bequeath your heirs something that they will never throw away. Make yourself into a diamond. Prices are posted. The Life Gems company is even making Beethoven into three diamonds.

However, it is impossible to distinguish LifeGem synthetic diamonds from other synthetic diamonds. How do you know that you are really in there? See one doubter's view. After all, the value of a diamond is in its perceived, rather than its intrinsic, quality.

And speaking of diamonds, there are two companies, Gemesis and Apollo, who are making them. On the controversy between "real" (mined) and "synthetic" diamonds, Gemesis founder, retired General Carter Clarke says: "If you give a woman a choice between a 2-carat stone and a 1-carat stone and everything else is the same, including the price, what's she gonna choose?" "Does she care if it's synthetic or not? Is anybody at a party going to walk up to her and ask, 'Is that synthetic?' There's no way in hell. So I'll bite your ass if she chooses the smaller one."

Gemesis makes traditional jewel-shaped stones by compressing graphite in a washing-machine-sized pressure chamber.

Apollo is using chemical vapor deposition (CVD is used for microchip manufacturing) to build diamond wafers in which to imbed electronic circuits. Diamond is an insulator, but they have been able to "dope" the wafers with Boron and Phosphorus to make it a semiconductor. Diamond can withstand heat levels that would melt current chips. Couple a future diamond chip set to a watch-battery-sized fuel cell for power, and stand back.

Wired Magazine contributing author Joshua Davis contributed a comprehensive 2003 article about the new age of diamonds from Gemesis in Sarasota, Forida, and the dawning of the diamond semiconductor age being grown by Apollo in Boston, Mass. Another good article abpout these companies and about man-made diamonds (Feb 2, 2004) was published in Chemical and Engineering News .
Posted 8:55 AM by Andy (1) comments

       Comments:

Talk about being worth more dead than you are alive...

# posted by  whatley : September 03, 2006 4:15 PM
 
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