August 9, 2024 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Tom Zoellner purchased a diamond engagement ring and proposed. His girlfriend said "yes," and then suddenly walked out of his life, making Tom the owner of a used engagement ring. Instead of hitting the self-help shelves of his local bookstore, he hit the road to discover the true worth of this shining gem. He then wrote The Heartless Stone.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is our American stories, and our next story is
about a gem. It turns out diamonds haven't always been
rare stones since eighteen seventy, when huge diamond mines were
discovered in South Africa. Soon after that discovery, the British
financiers behind the South African mining effort realized the diamond
(00:36):
market would be saturated if they didn't do something about it,
so in eighteen eighty eight, they set two audacious goals.
One monopolized diamond prices by creating to beer's minds to
beers would then be able to stabilize the market by
creating both the supply and the demand for diamonds worldwide.
(00:57):
Tom Zohlner is a journalist and professor who lives in
Los Angeles. He wrote the book The Heartless Stone, a
journey through the world of diamonds, deceit and desire. Here's
Tom with the story of that journey.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My name is Tom z Olner. And when I was
thirty two years old, I entered into what is a
fairly common right of passage for a man in America.
I asked somebody to marry me, and I gave her
a diamond engagement ring. Because that's just what you were
supposed to do. And I knew very little about diamonds.
(01:33):
I studied up on it as best I could, which
wasn't very deep. And I learned that there's this tradition
out there that you're supposed to spend two months of
your salary as a benchmark, sort of a sliding scale
for what's expected. And I wanted to do what was expected,
so I figured out what I could afford, and I
(01:56):
bought her name is Anne? Was Anne? I bought her
a diamond ring. I say was because the engagement broke
up and I was made the owner of a used
diamond ring, and I learned, Wow, there's really not a
lot to do with this. I didn't want to let
(02:16):
go of it for emotional reasons, and I also learned
if I was just going to sell it back on
the used market, that there really is no use market.
And as the ring just sort of sat there in
the back of my closet, I began to wonder more
and more about it. And it might have been a
way of channeling the grief over the lost relationship, but
(02:38):
I began to look into diamonds in a way that
was a little bit deeper and a little bit different
than than I did when I was researching what to buy.
I wanted to know where did this come from? And
so this took me on we might call a quest.
It lasted for eighteen months, and in that time I
(02:59):
went to sixteen different countries on the globe to try
and understand where diamonds come from and why we hunger
for them. So I'll tell you just a little bit
about where I went. First, I went to a place
called the Central African Republic, which is a diamond producing
nation at the heart of Africa. It's one of the
(03:19):
poorest countries on the globe. It produces It's ranks number
ten in terms of diamond production among all countries. And
yet it is poverty of some of the worst kind,
political instability of some of the worst kind, and those
two things, unfortunately go together. I went out to the
(03:41):
back country and learned how diamonds are mined for guys
who are making less than a dollar an hour to
comb through the soil, very dangerous work, sometimes in violent conditions,
to find these pieces of carbon which are brought up
to the Earth's surface through these volcanic tubes of what's
(04:04):
called the kimberlite, and so you find them in the
river bottoms as some of the most primitive mining imaginable.
And some of these diamonds, emerging from such miserable conditions,
still find their way to the US market. I went
to Angola, another nation in Africa, of course, which has
(04:24):
been racked with had been racked by civil war, largely
funded through the smuggling and the sales of diamonds. I
went to India, which is the headquarters of the Indian
state of Gujarat, polishes the majority of diamonds in the world,
and I saw the conditions in some of these factories
(04:47):
where child labor is used to get the diamonds into
the glittery shape that westerners have expected. I went to
Russia to see the birth and still the headquarters of
the synthetic diamond industry, a way that machines have been
built to recreate the heat and the pressure and the
(05:11):
Earth's mantle that create the diamonds in the first place.
And then I took a long look at the marketing
history of the diamond the way that these shiny pebbles
have been sold to Western consumers through the genius. And
I say that word with a certain amount of respect,
(05:32):
but also advisedly the genius of the corporation called De
Beer's Consolidated Mines, which cornered the market in South Africa
in the eighteen nineties thanks to the scheming of an
Oxford graduate named Cecil Roads, for whom the Rhodes Scholars
(05:53):
are named. Cecil Roads founded the De Beer's Corporation and
hit upon the insight that the way that you create
high prices for these little minerals is that you just
simply create artificial scarcity in the market, which is what
he did and what De Beer's continues to try and accomplish,
(06:16):
even though it no longer dominates the market as it
did today. So it was not only a hive of
artificial scarcity, it was also a marketing factory. It was
the De Beer's Corporation that created this idea out of
whole cloth, an invented custom that a young man is
(06:38):
supposed to spend two months of his salary on his
sweetheart's engagement ring. That turns out it sounds like something
from Charles Dickens, but it's actually a complete marketing fable,
and it was also out of the De Beer's idea
factory with the help of a New York ad agency
called J. Walter Thompson. This idea of the eternity of
(07:03):
a diamond, the poetry surrounding this trinket. I looked back
at some of the ads that were created in the
Great Depression to convince American men that this is what
they needed to do just to spend money, even in
the midst of a depression, and the ads all centered
around the idea of temporality and of mortality, and of
(07:27):
the idea that this diamond is going to survive you.
It's almost rather morbid, but this was a successful advertising strategy,
and it was out of this notion that your diamond
will last beyond you that the brilliant slogan was coined.
A diamond is forever the diamond engagement ring. How else
(07:50):
could two months salary last forever? A diamond is forever
to beers So just to give respect where respect is due.
There is something chemically unique about a diamond. It's as
it goes on the Moss scale of density. It is
a ten out of a ten scale. Almost no other mineral,
(08:13):
In fact, no other mineral has the ability to slow
down light within the chamber of its interiors. This is
why a diamond sparkles so well. The speed of light
at eighty six one thousand miles per second, has slowed
down to seventy seven thousand miles per second within a diamond,
(08:35):
which is why it sparkles. And when you polish it
and a particular configuration, the effect is really dazzling. I
have no issue with that, but slow down the light
in some ways as a metaphor for the diamond itself.
It is a chamber of slow light and emptiness because
(08:59):
at the heart of the diamond, which was my conclusion,
is mythology, the mythology that society has spun around it,
and the individual mythologies that we put around diamonds, the
story we tell about them, which is, in fact, in
its most prominent feature, the story of our engagement, the
story of our marriage, one of the most mysterious and
(09:23):
frightening and lovely and potentially heartbreaking things that we get
to do. The genius of Taber's and the diamond industry
was that it was able to set up a toll
booth right at the entrance to this adventure, and this,
for me is the true legacy of the diamond, and
(09:43):
at the heart of the book that I wrote called
The Heartless Stone.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And you've been listening to Tom Zohner, journalist and professor,
his book The Heartless Stone, The Story of the Diamond.
Here on our American stories.
This is our American stories, and our next story is
about a gem. It turns out diamonds haven't always been
rare stones since eighteen seventy, when huge diamond mines were
discovered in South Africa. Soon after that discovery, the British
financiers behind the South African mining effort realized the diamond
(00:36):
market would be saturated if they didn't do something about it,
so in eighteen eighty eight, they set two audacious goals.
One monopolized diamond prices by creating to beer's minds to
beers would then be able to stabilize the market by
creating both the supply and the demand for diamonds worldwide.
(00:57):
Tom Zohlner is a journalist and professor who lives in
Los Angeles. He wrote the book The Heartless Stone, a
journey through the world of diamonds, deceit and desire. Here's
Tom with the story of that journey.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My name is Tom z Olner. And when I was
thirty two years old, I entered into what is a
fairly common right of passage for a man in America.
I asked somebody to marry me, and I gave her
a diamond engagement ring. Because that's just what you were
supposed to do. And I knew very little about diamonds.
(01:33):
I studied up on it as best I could, which
wasn't very deep. And I learned that there's this tradition
out there that you're supposed to spend two months of
your salary as a benchmark, sort of a sliding scale
for what's expected. And I wanted to do what was expected,
so I figured out what I could afford, and I
(01:56):
bought her name is Anne? Was Anne? I bought her
a diamond ring. I say was because the engagement broke
up and I was made the owner of a used
diamond ring, and I learned, Wow, there's really not a
lot to do with this. I didn't want to let
(02:16):
go of it for emotional reasons, and I also learned
if I was just going to sell it back on
the used market, that there really is no use market.
And as the ring just sort of sat there in
the back of my closet, I began to wonder more
and more about it. And it might have been a
way of channeling the grief over the lost relationship, but
(02:38):
I began to look into diamonds in a way that
was a little bit deeper and a little bit different
than than I did when I was researching what to buy.
I wanted to know where did this come from? And
so this took me on we might call a quest.
It lasted for eighteen months, and in that time I
(02:59):
went to sixteen different countries on the globe to try
and understand where diamonds come from and why we hunger
for them. So I'll tell you just a little bit
about where I went. First, I went to a place
called the Central African Republic, which is a diamond producing
nation at the heart of Africa. It's one of the
(03:19):
poorest countries on the globe. It produces It's ranks number
ten in terms of diamond production among all countries. And
yet it is poverty of some of the worst kind,
political instability of some of the worst kind, and those
two things, unfortunately go together. I went out to the
(03:41):
back country and learned how diamonds are mined for guys
who are making less than a dollar an hour to
comb through the soil, very dangerous work, sometimes in violent conditions,
to find these pieces of carbon which are brought up
to the Earth's surface through these volcanic tubes of what's
(04:04):
called the kimberlite, and so you find them in the
river bottoms as some of the most primitive mining imaginable.
And some of these diamonds, emerging from such miserable conditions,
still find their way to the US market. I went
to Angola, another nation in Africa, of course, which has
(04:24):
been racked with had been racked by civil war, largely
funded through the smuggling and the sales of diamonds. I
went to India, which is the headquarters of the Indian
state of Gujarat, polishes the majority of diamonds in the world,
and I saw the conditions in some of these factories
(04:47):
where child labor is used to get the diamonds into
the glittery shape that westerners have expected. I went to
Russia to see the birth and still the headquarters of
the synthetic diamond industry, a way that machines have been
built to recreate the heat and the pressure and the
(05:11):
Earth's mantle that create the diamonds in the first place.
And then I took a long look at the marketing
history of the diamond the way that these shiny pebbles
have been sold to Western consumers through the genius. And
I say that word with a certain amount of respect,
(05:32):
but also advisedly the genius of the corporation called De
Beer's Consolidated Mines, which cornered the market in South Africa
in the eighteen nineties thanks to the scheming of an
Oxford graduate named Cecil Roads, for whom the Rhodes Scholars
(05:53):
are named. Cecil Roads founded the De Beer's Corporation and
hit upon the insight that the way that you create
high prices for these little minerals is that you just
simply create artificial scarcity in the market, which is what
he did and what De Beer's continues to try and accomplish,
(06:16):
even though it no longer dominates the market as it
did today. So it was not only a hive of
artificial scarcity, it was also a marketing factory. It was
the De Beer's Corporation that created this idea out of
whole cloth, an invented custom that a young man is
(06:38):
supposed to spend two months of his salary on his
sweetheart's engagement ring. That turns out it sounds like something
from Charles Dickens, but it's actually a complete marketing fable,
and it was also out of the De Beer's idea
factory with the help of a New York ad agency
called J. Walter Thompson. This idea of the eternity of
(07:03):
a diamond, the poetry surrounding this trinket. I looked back
at some of the ads that were created in the
Great Depression to convince American men that this is what
they needed to do just to spend money, even in
the midst of a depression, and the ads all centered
around the idea of temporality and of mortality, and of
(07:27):
the idea that this diamond is going to survive you.
It's almost rather morbid, but this was a successful advertising strategy,
and it was out of this notion that your diamond
will last beyond you that the brilliant slogan was coined.
A diamond is forever the diamond engagement ring. How else
(07:50):
could two months salary last forever? A diamond is forever
to beers So just to give respect where respect is due.
There is something chemically unique about a diamond. It's as
it goes on the Moss scale of density. It is
a ten out of a ten scale. Almost no other mineral,
(08:13):
In fact, no other mineral has the ability to slow
down light within the chamber of its interiors. This is
why a diamond sparkles so well. The speed of light
at eighty six one thousand miles per second, has slowed
down to seventy seven thousand miles per second within a diamond,
(08:35):
which is why it sparkles. And when you polish it
and a particular configuration, the effect is really dazzling. I
have no issue with that, but slow down the light
in some ways as a metaphor for the diamond itself.
It is a chamber of slow light and emptiness because
(08:59):
at the heart of the diamond, which was my conclusion,
is mythology, the mythology that society has spun around it,
and the individual mythologies that we put around diamonds, the
story we tell about them, which is, in fact, in
its most prominent feature, the story of our engagement, the
story of our marriage, one of the most mysterious and
(09:23):
frightening and lovely and potentially heartbreaking things that we get
to do. The genius of Taber's and the diamond industry
was that it was able to set up a toll
booth right at the entrance to this adventure, and this,
for me is the true legacy of the diamond, and
(09:43):
at the heart of the book that I wrote called
The Heartless Stone.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
And you've been listening to Tom Zohner, journalist and professor,
his book The Heartless Stone, The Story of the Diamond.
Here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.