www.925-1000.com

Postnikov wrote:Hi piette -

here is a typicall thumbpiece with diamonds. In Russia (Imperial) diamonds have not been something special or rare - they had enough of them. It was used more for women´s jewellerys - not for cigarette cases for men!
Too feminin...



Regards
Postnikov

It is interesting to know that diamonds weren't often used - is there any particular reason for this?

Up until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were a genuinely rare stone. They were found only in a few river beds in India and the jungles Brazil. The entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to only a few pounds a year.

In 1870, however, there was a radical change in this situation. Huge diamond "pipes" were discovered near the Orange River in South Africa.

These were the first diamond mines ever discovered. Now, rather than finding by chance an occasional diamond in a river, diamonds could now be scooped out of these mines by huge steam shovels. Suddenly, the market was deluged a growing flood of diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly came to realize that their investment was endangered: diamonds had little intrinsic value, and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. They feared that when new mines developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only a semi-precious gem.

As it turned out, financial acumen proved the mother of invention. The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control the mines' production and, in every other way that was necessary, perpetuate the scarcity and illusion of diamonds. The instrument that they created for this purpose was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., a company incorporated in South Africa.

In 1829 diamonds were discovered on the European side of the Ural mountains in the gold washings near the iron mines of Bissersk. Engelhardt conjectured that they were derived from a dolomite rock, but others state that it is mica slate like that of Brazil. Only about seventy were found in the first twenty years, and all of them small, the largest weighing under 8 carats. The only other European locality is at Dlaschkowitz, in Bohemia, where a single diamond was found in the sand containing pyropes, -- the one said by Murray to have been picked up in a brook in Ireland being very doubtful.

finnclouds wrote:about seventy were found in the first twenty years, and all of them small, the largest weighting under 8 carats