Diamonds – a Geek’s Best Friend? - The Diamond Mine in Florida

Carter Clarke, a septuagenarian retired from the Army for 30 years, stumbled onto the machine about ten years ago, when he was looking for something else. Back then the entrepreneur owned Security Tag Systems, the company that pioneered the large plastic antitheft devices often attached to clothing sold in retail stores. Clarke was in Moscow researching Russian antitheft technology when he met Yurily Semenov, head of the High Tech Bureau. The bureau’s mission was to sell Soviet-era military research to Western investors. Rather than show him antitheft technology, Semenov asked Clarke: “How would you like to grow diamonds?”

What Semenov hoped to sell wasn’t magic. It was a four-ton machine that used hydraulics and electricity to build up pressure and heat in its spherical core. Put a tiny sliver of diamond in the center, add carbon, turn it on, and three days later the machine produces a three carat yellow diamond. After witnessing a demonstration, Clarke immediately ordered three.

The machines weren’t perfect. At the time Clarke bought them, they did not reliably produce diamonds. After moving the machines – and the Russians who knew how to operate them – to Florida, Clarke consulted with a professor from the University of Florida’s materials science department. The problem, Dr. Rob Chodelka discovered, was that the process used too much human intervention, adding to the uncertainties of how each stone will come out. “When the machines initially came over, one of the large problems were they were manually operated. There was a person sitting in front of that machine twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, while the machine was running, controlling the principle properties for that machine to operate, the pressure and the temperature,” said Dr. Chodelka in an interview with BBC Horizon. In order to produce a consistent product on a consistent basis, Dr. Chodelka and others re-engineered the machines to be controlled by computers.

Clarke’s company, Gemesis, now owns 23 diamond-making machines, each one producing a three-carat yellow diamond every three days. While he does plan to enter the semiconductor business with his diamonds, the Gemesis website currently focuses on their use in jewelry. This move actually makes sense, since it will help raise money for this former general’s assault on the semiconductor business. Jewelry purchasers pay more for colored diamonds like the ones Clarke’s machines produce because they are much rarer than colorless ones. Even if he charges only 25 percent of what his stones would fetch if they had been mined, he would still receive $3,500 to $4,000 per diamond – not bad for something that cost about $100 to make.

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