H.G. Wells - "The Diamond Maker" - 1895

🎧 H.G. Wells - "The Diamond Maker" (1895) 💎🕯️

A tale of ambition, tragedy, and shimmering mystery! 🌌✨ On a dark and misty evening by the Thames, the narrator encounters a disheveled stranger who claims to have achieved the impossible: creating artificial diamonds. 💎⚗️ But this discovery has come at a great cost—poverty, ruin, and a life on the run from skeptics and swindlers. 🌫️🏚️ Is this man a visionary, cursed by his brilliance, or a desperate fraud? 🤔🔍In this gripping short story, H.G. Wells explores the intersection of science, greed, and the weight of society’s disbelief. Both melancholic and thought-provoking, it challenges us to consider the price of discovery and the fragility of human ambition. 🌍🌀

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H. G. Wells, The Diamond Maker, published in eighteen ninety five.
Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane nine in
the evening, and thereafter, having some inkling of a headache,
I was disinclined either for entertainment or further work. So
much of the sky as the high cliffs of that

(00:21):
narrow cannon of traffic left visible, spoke of a serene night,
and I determined to make my way down to the
embankment and rest my eyes and cool my head by
watching the variegated lights upon the river. Beyond comparison, the
night is the best time for this place. A merciful
darkness hides the dirt of the waters, and the lights
of this transitional age red, glaring, orange, gas, yellow, and

(00:44):
electric white are set in shadowy outlines of every possible shade,
between gray and deep purple. Through the arches of Waterloo Bridge,
a hundred points of light mark the sweep of the embankment,
and above its parapet rise the towers of Westminster warm
gray against the starlight. The black River goes by with
only a rare ripple, breaking its silence and disturbing the

(01:07):
reflections of the lights that swim upon its surface. A
warm night, said a voice at my side. I turned
my head and saw the profile of a man who
was leaning over the parapet beside me. It was a
refined face, not unhandsome, though pinched and pale enough, and
the coat collar turned up and pinned round the throat

(01:28):
marked his status in life as sharply as a uniform.
I felt, I was committed to the price of a
bed and breakfast if I answered him, I looked at
him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth
the money? Or was he the common and capable, incapable
even of telling his own story. There was a quality

(01:49):
of intelligence in his forehead and eyes, and a certain
tremulousness in his nether lip that decided me very warm,
said I. But not too warm for us here, No,
he said, still looking across the water. It is pleasant
enough here, just now. It is good, he continued, after

(02:09):
a pause, to find anything so RESTful as this in London,
after one has been fretting about business all day, about
getting on, meeting obligations and parrying dangers. I do not
know what one would do if it were not for
such pacific corners. He spoke, with long pauses between the sentences.

(02:31):
You must know a little of the irksome labor of
the world, or you would not be here. But I
doubt if you can be so brain weary and footsore
as I am. Bah Sometimes I doubt if the game
is worth the candle. I feel inclined to throw the
whole thing over, name, wealth and position, and take to
some modest trade. But I know if I abandoned my

(02:54):
ambition hardly as she uses me, I should have nothing
but remorse left for the rest of my days. He
became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever
I saw a man hopelessly hard up, it was the
man in front of me. He was ragged, and he
was dirty, unshaven, and unkempt. He looked as though he

(03:16):
had been left in a dust bin for a week.
And he was talking to me of the irksome worries
of a large business. I almost laughed outright. Either he
was mad or playing a sorry jest on his own poverty.
If high aims and high positions said, I have their
drawbacks of hard work and anxiety, they have their compensations

(03:39):
influence the power of doing good, of assisting those weaker
and poorer than ourselves, and there is even a certain
gratification in display. My banter under the circumstances, was in
very vile taste. I spoke on the spur of the
contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even
while I was speaking. He turned a haggard but very

(04:02):
composed face upon me, said he I forgot myself. Of
course you would not understand, he measured me for a moment.
No doubt, it is very absurd. You will not believe
me even when I tell you. So that it is
fairly safe to tell you, and it will be a

(04:22):
comfort to tell someone I really have a big business
in hand, a very big business. But there are troubles
just now. The fact is I make diamonds. I suppose,
said I. You are out of work just at present.
I am sick of being disbelieved, he said impatiently, and suddenly,

(04:44):
unbuttoning his wretched coat, he pulled out a little canvas
bag that was hanging by a cord round his neck.
From this he produced a brown pebble. I wonder if
you know enough to know what that is? He handed
it to me. Now, a year or so ago, I
had occupied my leisure in taking a London science degree,

(05:05):
so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy.
The thing was not unlike an uncut diamond of the
darker sort, though far too large, being almost as big
as the top of my thumb. I took it and
saw it had the form of a regular octahedron, with
the curved faces peculiar to the most precious of minerals.

(05:26):
I took out my penknife and tried to scratch it, vainly,
leaning forward towards the gas lamp. I tried the thing
on my watch glass and scored a white line across
that with the greatest ease. I looked at my interlocutor
with rising curiosity. It certainly is rather like a diamond.

(05:46):
But if so, it is a behemoth of diamonds. Where
did you get it? I tell you I made it,
he said, give it back to me. He replaced it
hastily and buttoned his jacket. I will sell at you
for one hundred pounds, he suddenly whispered, eagerly. With that,

(06:06):
my suspicions returned. The thing might, after all be merely
a lump of that almost equally hard substance corundum, with
an accidental resemblance in shape to the diamond, or if
it was a diamond, how came he by it? And
why should he offer it at a hundred pounds. We
looked into one another's eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager.

(06:31):
At that moment, I believed it was a diamond he
was trying to sell. Yet I am a poor man.
A hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my fortunes,
and no sane man would buy a diamond by gas
light from a ragged tramp on his personal warranty. Only Still,
a diamond that size conjured up a vision of many
thousands of pounds. Then, thought I such a stone could

(06:56):
scarcely exist without being mentioned in every book on gems.
And again I called to mind the stories of contraband
and light fingered kaffirs. At the cape, I put the
question of purchase on one side. How did you get it?
Said I? I made it. I had heard something of Moisa,

(07:16):
but I knew his artificial diamonds were very small. I
shook my head. You seem to know something of this
kind of thing. I will tell you a little about myself.
Perhaps then you may think better of the purchase. He
turned round with his back to the river, and put
his hands in his pockets. He sighed, I know you

(07:39):
will not believe me. Diamonds, he began, and as he
spoke his voice lost its faint flavor of the tramp
and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated
man are to be made by throwing carbon out of
combination in a suitable flux and under a suitable pressure.
The carbon crystallizes out, not as black lead or charcoal,

(08:00):
but as small diamonds. So much has been known to
chemists for years, but no one yet had hit upon
exactly the right flux in which to melt up the carbon,
or exactly the right pressure for the best results. Consequently,
the diamonds made by chemists are small and dark, and
worthless as jewels. Now, I, you know, have given up

(08:22):
my life to this problem, given my life to it.
I began to work at the conditions of diamond making
when I was seventeen, and now I am thirty two.
It seemed to me that it might take all the
thought and energies of a man for ten years or
twenty years. But even if it did, the game was
still worth the candle. Suppose one to have at last

(08:45):
just hit the right trick before the secret got out.
In diamonds became as common as coal, one might realize millions, millions.
He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone
hungrily to think, said he that I am on the
verge of it all. And here I had He proceeded

(09:07):
about a thousand pounds when I was twenty one, And
this I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would
keep my researches going. A year or two was spent
in study at Berlin, chiefly, and then I continued on
my own account. The trouble was the secrecy. You see,
if once I had let out what I was doing,
other men might have been spurred on by my belief

(09:30):
in the practicability of the idea. And I do not
pretend to be such a genius as to have been
sure of coming in first in the case of a
race for the discovery. And you see, it was important
that if I really meant to make a pile, people
should not know it was an artificial process and capable
of turning out diamonds by the ton. So I had

(09:50):
to work all alone. At first, I had a little laboratory.
But as my resources began to run out, I had
to conduct my experiments in a wretched, unfurnished room in Kent,
where I slept at last on a straw mattress on
the floor, among all my apparatus. The money simply flowed away.
I grudged myself everything except scientific appliances. I tried to

(10:14):
keep things going by a little teaching, but I am
not a very good teacher, and I have no university
degree nor very much education except in chemistry. And I
found I had to give a lot of time and
labor for precious little money. But I got nearer and
nearer the thing. Three years ago I settled the problem
of the composition of the flux and got near the

(10:36):
pressure by putting this flux of mine in a certain
carbon composition into a closed up gun barrel, filling up
with water, sealing tightly and heating. He paused, rather risky,
said I yes, it burst and smashed all my windows
and a lot of my apparatus. But I got a

(10:58):
kind of diamond powder, nevertheles less. Following out the problem
of getting a big pressure upon the molten mixture from
which the things were to crystallize, I hit upon some
researches of debris at the Paris Laboratory de poudre zidi Salpiters.
He exploded dynamite in a tightly screwed steel cylinder too
strong to burst, and I found he could crush rocks

(11:20):
into a muck, not unlike the South African bed in
which diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on
my resources, but I got a steel cylinder made for
my purpose after his pattern. I put in all my
stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my furnace,
put the whole concern in and went out for a walk.

(11:42):
I could not help laughing at his matter of fact manner.
Did you not think it would blow up the house?
Were there other people in the place? It was in
the interest of science, he said. Ultimately, there was a
costermonger family on the floor below, a begging writer in
the room behind mine, and two flower women were upstairs.

(12:05):
Perhaps it was a bit thoughtless, but possibly some of
them were out. When I came back, the thing was
just where I left it, among the white hot coals.
The explosive hadn't burst the case, and then I had
a problem to face you know, time is an important
element in crystallization. If you hurry the process, the crystals

(12:28):
are small. It is only by prolonged standing that they
grow to any size. I resolved to let this apparatus
cool for two years, letting the temperature go down slowly
during the time. And I was now quite out of money,
and with a big fire in the rent of my room,
as well as my hunger to satisfy. I had scarcely

(12:48):
a penny in the world. I can hardly tell you
all the shifts I was put to while I was
making the diamonds. I have sold newspapers, held horses open doors.
For many weeks, I addressed envelopes. I had a place
as assistant to a man who owned a barrow and
used to call down one side of the road while

(13:10):
he called down the other. Once for a week, I
had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged what a
week that was. One day the fire was going out,
and I had eaten nothing all day, and a little
chap taking his girl out, gave me sixpence to show off.
Thank Heaven for vanity. How the fish shop smelt. But

(13:34):
I went and spent it all on coals and had
the furnace bright red again, and then well, hunger makes
a fool of a man. At last, three weeks ago,
I let the fire out. I took my cylinder and
unscrewed it while it was still so hot that it
punished my hands. And I scraped out the crumbling lava
like mass with a chisel and hammered it into a

(13:57):
powder upon an iron plate. And I found three big
diamonds and five small ones. As I sat on the
floor hammering, my door opened and my neighbor, the begging
letter writer, came in. He was drunk, as he usually is.
Nurchist said he you're drunk, said I, destructive scoundrel, said

(14:19):
he go to your father, said I, meaning the father
of lies. Never you mind, said he, and gave me
a cunning wink, and hiccuped, and, leaning up against the
door with his other eye against the door post, began
to babble of how he had been prying in my room,
and how he had gone to the police that morning,
and how they had taken down everything he had to say.

(14:41):
Sypha was a g e m said he. Then I
suddenly realized I was in a hole either. I should
have to tell these police my little secret and get
the whole thing blown upon, or be lagged as an anarchist.
So I went up to my neighbor and took him
by the collar and rolled him about a bit, and
then I gathered up my diamonds and cleared out. The

(15:03):
evening newspapers called my den the Kentish town bomb factory.
And now I cannot part with the things for love
or money if I go into respectable jewelers. They asked
me to wait and go and whisper to a clerk
to fetch a policeman. And then I say I cannot wait.
And I found out a receiver of stolen goods, and

(15:25):
he simply stuck to the one I gave him, and
told me to prosecute if I wanted it back. I
am going about now with several hundred thousand pounds worth
of diamonds round my neck, and without either food or shelter.
You are the first person I have taken into my confidence.
But I like your face, and I am hard driven.
He looked into my eyes. It would be madness, said

(15:49):
I for me to buy a diamond under the circumstances. Besides,
I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my pocket.
Yet I more than half leave your story. I will,
if you like, do this, come to my office tomorrow.
You think I am a thief, said he, keenly, you

(16:10):
will tell the police. I am not coming into a trap.
Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is
my card. Take that. Anyhow, you need not come to
any appointment. Come when you will. He took the card, and,
in earnest of my good will, think better of it,

(16:32):
and come, said I. He shook his head doubtfully. I
will pay back your half crown with interest some day,
such interest as will amaze you, said he. Anyhow, you
will keep the secret. Don't follow me. He crossed the
road and went into the darkness towards the little steps

(16:53):
under the archway leading into Essex Street. And I let
him go, and that was the last I ever saw
of him. Afterwards, I had two letters from him asking
me to send banknotes, not checks, to certain addresses. I
weighed the matter over and took what I conceived to
be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when

(17:14):
I was out, my urchin described him as a very thin,
dirty and ragged man with a dreadful cough. He left
no message. That was the finish of him. So far
as my story goes, I wonder sometimes what has become
of him? Was he an ingenious monomaniac, or a fraudulent

(17:35):
dealer in pebbles? Or has he really made diamonds as
he asserted? The latter is just sufficiently credible to make
me think at times that I have missed the most
brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead,
and his diamonds carelessly thrown aside. One, I repeat, was
almost as big as my thumb. Or he may be

(17:57):
still wandering about trying to sell the things. It is
just possible he may yet emerge upon society, and, passing
athwart my heavens, in the serene altitude sacred to the wealthy,
and the well advertised, reproach me silently for my want
of enterprise. I sometimes think I might at least have
risked five pounds