Turning ordinary stuff into something precious is a thing of fairytales, right?
Back in the day alchemists might have spent their entire lives trying to turn something
not that valuable, like lead, into something valuable such as gold.
They believed that everything contained some kind of universal spirit, and so something
like lead just hadn’t matured enough to be something precious such as gold.
Even one of our greatest scientists Isaac Newton wrote a lot about alchemy, but in the
end the entire tradition was based on faulty thinking.
That didn’t stop people from saying they had solved the riddle of alchemy, and it hasn’t
stopped us from asking if its possible to turn pencils into diamonds.
You might be surprised at what you hear today.
So, there is no word trickery here, we are talking about your regular pencil.
You might have seen online recipes for getting a pencil and with some fiddling around and
the use of a microwave someone claiming to have made a diamond.
This can’t be done and will likely just damage your microwave, so don’t fall for
it, it’s a hoax.
There is a website out there and a post from a man who claims to have wanted to get a diamond
for his wife for their 10-year Wedding Anniversary.
With photos he explains that with a pencil, some olive oil, some cups, some cotton and
a microwave oven he made a diamond.
We won’t go through the process because it’s utter balderdash anyway.
At the end of the post he wrote, “My wife was impressed.
After all, how many women can wear a diamond that their husband actually MADE?”
It was a prank, and he later admitted to that.
But don’t go yet, because we have a lot more to say about making diamonds from pencils.
Let us explain something about pencils.
That stuff entombed in the wood that you might have referred to as lead isn’t actually
lead.
It’s graphite, and which is said to be the most stable form of the element carbon.
You might also know that diamonds are also made out of carbon.
Why then don’t we just turn one kind of carbon into another kind, and buy a cheap
pencil and turn it into a diamond?
Well, first of all, we have to think about the structure of graphite.
The atoms in an element bond together in different ways.
To form graphite you have to have layers of a substance called graphene stacked on top
of each other.
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms bound together that looks much like a hexagonal
honeycomb lattice.
You’ve all seen a honeycomb we guess, and this is what it looks like.
Because of the way graphite is formed it is soft.
The simple explanation as to why diamonds are really hard is that their atoms are structured
in a different way.
Under high temperatures and pressure the carbon atoms bond and crystals form.
This bonding is very strong and compact, which makes diamonds very tough indeed.
We’ll let a scientist explain the magic since it’s above our pay grade:
“It's the process of atoms locking into place that produces this repeating network,
this structure of carbon atoms, that eventually grows large enough that it produces crystals
that we can see.
Each of these crystals, each diamond, one carat diamond, represents literally billions
and billions of carbon atoms that all had to lock into place to form this very orderly
crystalline structure.”
Those bonds for graphite on the other hand are not strong at all, but what we want to
know is why can’t we make them hard and turn graphite into a diamond?
It sounds silly, but in theory it should be possible.
The only problem is that according to scientists, to do that you’d need 150,000 times the
atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface.
That’s not exactly easy to do, but scientists found another way.
A few rather intelligent researchers at Stanford's SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis
really wanted to mess around with the structure of atoms but not to make diamonds.
What they were trying to do was change the physical properties of graphene to see if
they could make its useable in transistors.
On a very small scale they added hydrogen atoms to microscopic sheets of graphene.
These were placed on a platinum support structure, and the binding began after the hydrogen was
added and a domino effect ensued.
Things started to bind and this indeed changed the structure of the graphite.
What happened is that brittle graphite toughened up, so much so it became…you guessed it,
a diamond.
Hey presto, they created something precious out of something cheap.
The thing is, neither you nor I can do this experiment at home after buying a great big
stack of pencils.
This experiment was conducted at the microscopic level and used modern equipment.
But does it mean scientists can now start knocking diamonds out at will?
If so, have those scientists hung up their white coats and gotten into the diamond business?
The answer is no, because the diamonds they made weren’t the kind we see shining in
store windows.
The good news, though, is that diamonds produced this way can be used for industrial applications
such as coating blades to make them hard and sharp.
They might also be used for electrochemical sensors.
This will save some people a hell of a lot of money, since real diamonds are so darn
expensive.
While those diamonds were not the kind you might find embedded in rings, in 2018 Reuters
reported that the man-made diamond market was growing and part of that market included
jewelry.
One analyst in that report said, “The lab-grown diamond jewelry market was worth $1.9 billion
this year and is forecast to grow 22 percent annually to $5.2 billion by 2023 and $14.9
billion by 2035.”
We should stress that the two main ways of making these diamonds include using hydrogen
but there is also another way which involves using high pressure and high temperatures.
That story said on this market in 2018 only two percent of the entire jewelry market were
man-made diamonds, but in 2035 it is expected to be five percent.
Not long before that story was published the diamond company De Beers announced it had
gotten into the synthetic diamond business.
They are diamonds, but the company tells potential customers that they are “neither as valuable
or precious" as real natural stones.
So, in conclusion, you kind of can turn pencils into diamonds if you managed to extract the
pure graphite.
But no recipe on the Internet that involves using stuff you have in your house is the
real deal.
If you were to buy a diamond, would you go for the synthetic kind or the natural kind?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Why Are Rolex Watches So Expensive?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.