The Shocking Story Behind the Diamond Engagement Ring

On this episode of Our American Stories, when Tom Zoellner found himself holding a diamond engagement ring with no wedding ahead of it, he began to wonder how a single piece of jewelry had come to carry so much weight. That question sent him far from the jewelry counters where most people shop for engagement rings and deep into the long history behind them. His search led to Victorian engagement traditions, the rise of diamond marketing, and the complicated story of how a proposal ring became a cultural expectation. Tom shares how his journey reshaped the way he understood love, loss, and the meaning we assign to the things we wear. Check out his book The Heartless Stone for more of the story!

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Episode Transcript

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 Zolner is a journalist and professor who lives in
Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
He wrote the book The.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
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's Olner.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
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. I studied up on it as

(01:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
And I bought her name is Anne? Was Anne? I
bought her a diamond ring.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
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 go of it
for emotional reasons, and I also learned if I was
just going to sell it back on the used market,

(02:22):
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 I began to look
into diamonds in a way that was a little bit

(02:42):
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 went to sixteen
different countries on the globe to try and understand where

(03:04):
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 poorest countries on the globe. It
produces It's ranks number ten in terms of diamond production

(03:27):
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 back country and learned how diamonds
are mined for guys who are making less than a

(03:48):
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 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

(04:14):
from such miserable conditions, still find their way to the
US market. I went to Angola, another nation in Africa,
of course, which has 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

(04:36):
headquarters the Indian state of Gujarat, polishes the majority of
diamonds in the world, and I saw the conditions in
some of these factories 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

(05:01):
the headquarters of the synthetic diamond industry, a way that
machines have been built to recreate the heat and the
pressure and the 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

(05:22):
these shiny pebbles have been sold to Western consumers through
the genius.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
And I say that word.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
With a certain amount of respect, 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,

(05:51):
from whom the Rhodes Scholars 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

(06:13):
Beer's continues to try and accomplish, 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

(06:36):
custom that a young man is 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.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Walter Thompson.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
This idea of the eternity of 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,

(07:21):
and the ads all centered around the idea of temporality
and of mortality, and of the idea that this diamond
is going.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
To survive you.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
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. The brilliant slogan was coined, A
diamond is forever.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
The diamond engagement ring. How else could two months salary
last forever? A diamond is forever to beers.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
So just a 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,
In fact, no other mineral has the ability to slow
down light within the chamber of its interiors. This is

(08:22):
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,
which is why it sparkles, and when you polish it
in a particular configuration, the effect is really dazzling.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
I have no issue with that, but.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
To slow down the light in some ways as a
metaphor for the diamond itself. It is a chamber of
slow light and emptiness because 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

(09:10):
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 frightening and lovely and potentially heartbreaking things
that we get to do. The genius of Taber's and

(09:31):
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 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.