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The History of Diamonds: Kings, Empires, Blood & Brilliance | Sleep Story (Rain Sounds) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History, the show where we drift gently through the past together.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, we are going to spend our time tracing the long and quiet history of diamonds.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will move slowly, the way we always do, following these small pieces of crystallised carbon from the deep furnace of the earth through the hands of ancient kings across old trade routes, into the minds of Southern Africa, and finally into the modern world of laboratories, marketing
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter one, born in fire, found in rivers.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before there were people to admire them, diamonds were already forming, deep inside the earth, far below anything we could ever hope to reach with a shovel or a drill.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand where diamonds come from, we have to go back roughly 1 billion to 3 billion years.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere between 140 and 190 kilometers beneath the surface, down there the pressure is immense, something like 45 to 60 kilobars, and the temperature hovers around 900 to 1,300 degrees Celsius.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: under those conditions.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carbon atoms, the same element found in the graphite of a pencil, or the sort of a candle flame, are squeezed and heated until they rearrange themselves into a new, tightly bonded lattice structure.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: That structure is what we call a diamond.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is, in the simplest terms, carbon that has been put under so much stress for so long,
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: that it has transformed into the hardest, naturally occurring material known.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of the earth's history, these diamonds simply sat there, locked away in the mantle, with absolutely no way of reaching the surface.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took a very specific and very violent kind of volcanic eruption to bring them up.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Geologists call these eruptions Kimberlite eruptions, named after the town of Kimberlite in South Africa, where the connection was first understood in the 1800s.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Kimberlite eruption is not a slow gentle lava flow, like the kind you might picture from a documentary about Hawaii.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is closer to an explosion, a rapid, almost violent surge of magma racing up through narrow channels in the Earth's crust, at speeds that some scientists estimate could have reached tens of kilometers per hour.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: This speed mattered enormously.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because if the magma move too slowly, the diamonds carried up within it would have simply converted back into ordinary graphite before they ever reach the surface.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rapid assent essentially flash froze the diamonds in their high pressure form, carrying them upward inside carot-shaped volcanic pipes that we now call Kimberlite pipes.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: These Kimberlite pipes are, in a sense, nature's own delivery system for diamonds, but they are also exceedingly rare.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only a small percentage of Kimberlite pipes ever found actually contain diamonds in any commercially meaningful quantity.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most are simply Baron Rock.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even where diamonds do exist within a Kimberlite pipe, they are usually spread out in tiny concentrations, often measured in parts per million relative to the surrounding rock.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is part of why diamonds remained rare and precious for so much of human history.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even once people understood roughly where to look, actually finding a diamond required processing an enormous volume of rock and soil for every single stone recovered.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before people ever dug a mine shaft in search of a Kimberlight pipe though.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Diamonds had already been finding their own way to the surface for millions of years through an entirely different and much gentler process.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Erosion, wind, rain and rivers would slowly wear away the softer rock surrounding an exposed Kimberlite pipe.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because diamonds are so much harder than nearly everything around them,
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would survive this weathering essentially unchanged, washing downstream and settling into riverbeds, gravel deposits and sandy floodplains.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Geologists call these secondary deposits a luvial deposits, and it was in exactly this kind of setting along the banks of rivers.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: that people first began to discover diamonds.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This brings us to India, which for roughly 2,000 years held what was essentially a total monopoly on the world's diamond supply.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before diamonds were mined from underground Kimberlite pipes anywhere else on Earth, they were being gathered from a lovelie gravel along rivers in central and south-eastern India.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: particularly in a region known historically as Golkanda.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name Golkanda would later become almost synonymous with wealth and abundance.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: A word people used, the way we might now say something is a gold mine.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except in this case,
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The phrase originally meant an actual and specific place in India, where diamonds were pulled from the earth.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The earliest written references to diamonds in Indian texts date back roughly to the 4th century before the common era.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: appearing in a text known as the Arthur Shastra, a treatise on statecraft and economics traditionally attributed to an advisor named Caltilia.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this text, diamonds are discussed as valuable trade goods, and there are even earlier attempts to classify diamonds by quality, based on their colour, their clarity, and their weight.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is remarkable when you can
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Long before Europeans had developed any systematic way of grading gemstones, Indian traders and scholars were already thinking carefully about what separated a fine diamond from a poor one.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In these early centuries, diamonds in India were not primarily valued as symbols of romantic love, the way we tend to think of them today.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they carried a much more
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ancient Sanskrit texts describe diamonds as being associated with the divine, believed to offer protection from danger, and in some traditions thought to ward off evil spirits or bring good fortune to whoever possessed them.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are stories, some more legend than verified history, describing diamonds being placed in the eyes of religious statues.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: embedded into the hilts of ceremonial weapons, or sewn into the garments of rulers, not merely as decoration, but as a kind of spiritual armour.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: One particularly enduring legend, though its precise historical accuracy is difficult to confirm.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Describes ancient methods of diamond hunting in remote and treacherous valleys, where sheer cliffs may direct collection nearly impossible.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to these old stories, hunters would throw pieces of raw meat down into diamond bearing gorges, where the meat would land and diamonds embedded in the rock below would stick to its sticky surface.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Birds of prey, eagles or vultures would then swoop down, grab the meat
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: and carry it up to their nests on higher ground, where the hunters could later retrieve the meat, along with the diamonds still clinging to it.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not this story reflects an actual historical practice or is simply a colorful tale that grew in the retelling.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It made its way into a number of ancient and medieval writings, including works attributed to travellers
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: India's diamonds moved outward, along trade routes that connected the subcontinent to the Mediterranean world, to Persia and eventually to Europe.
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greek and Roman writers occasionally mention diamonds, though not always with full accuracy about their true nature.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder,
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: writing in the first century of the common era, described diamonds as the most valuable of all possessions, and also somewhat charmingly as being unbreakable by any force, a claim that reflects both admiration for the stone's hardness.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a certain amount of exaggeration.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since diamonds, while extraordinarily hard, are not actually indestructible.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They can, in fact, fracture along certain planes, if struck the wrong way, something later diamond cutters would come to understand and exploit quite deliberately.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of this early period,
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Diamonds reaching Europe and the Mediterranean world were exceedingly rare and reserved almost exclusively for royalty, religious institutions, or the very wealthiest merchants.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were not cut and faceted the way we think of diamonds today.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ancient peoples lacked the tools and technical understanding to shape a material as hard as diamond.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So early diamonds were typically used and displayed in their natural, uncut form.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes polished slightly along their naturally occurring flat crystal faces, but not reshaped in any dramatic way.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would take many more centuries and the slower accumulation of practical knowledge passed between craftsmen, before anyone developed reliable techniques for cutting a diamond surface into the sparkling, light catching shapes we now consider standard.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to consider just how differently ancient people's experience diamonds.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: compared to how we experience them now.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today, we associate diamonds with brilliance, with sparkle, with a dazzling play of light that seems almost designed to catch the eye.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But a natural, uncut diamond, straight from a riverbed in ancient India, would have looked quite different.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would have appeared as a somewhat greasy looking, often slightly cloudy crystal, sometimes with a shape resembling two pyramids joined at their base, a form crystallographers call an octahedron.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would not have sparkled in the way modern cut diamonds do.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its value, in these early centuries, came not from visual dazzle, but from its rarity, its hardness, and the layers of spiritual and symbolic meaning,
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: that had been woven around it over generations.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: As trade routes slowly expanded and strengthened, particularly the network of overland and maritime paths that we now sometimes grouped together under the general term of the Silk Road and its associated maritime branches.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Small quantities of Indian diamonds began making their way further and further west.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: they passed through Persian markets through Arab trading networks and eventually into the hands of Venetian and other Mediterranean merchants who would in turn carry them into the courts of medieval Europe.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This slow trickle of stones moving hand to hand across thousands of kilometers and multiple civilizations set the stage for the next major chapter in the story
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: One where these stones would become deeply entangled with the politics, wars, and royal families of medieval and early modern Europe.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, kings, courts, and the rise of European diamond culture.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time diamonds began arriving in medieval Europe in more consistent quantities.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometime around the 12th and 13th centuries, they were still extraordinarily rare and were treated as objects of enormous prestige, reserved almost entirely for monarchs, high-ranking nobility and the church.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unlike today, where a diamond ring might mark an engagement between two ordinary people, in medieval Europe, diamonds were far more likely to appear as part of a crown,
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: a relicory meant to hold sacred relics or the ceremonial regalia of a king or queen.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the earliest documented uses of a diamond, in what we would now recognize as a romantic or matrimonial context, comes from 1477, when Archduke Maximilian of Austria commissioned a diamond ring for his betrothal to Mary of Burgundy.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This event is frequently cited by historians, as marking something like the origin point of the diamond engagement ring tradition in Europe.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though it is worth noting that this practice would remain limited to only the wealthiest and most powerful families for several more centuries.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was certainly not yet anything resembling a widespread custom.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: During this period, the primary source of diamonds reaching Europe remained India.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And specifically, the alluvial deposits and mines associated with the Gold Condor Region.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: which by now had grown into something of a legendary place in the European imagination.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: A distant land where diamonds were said to be found scattered across the earth in almost unimaginable quantities.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though the reality of course, involved painstaking labour, sifting through enormous volumes of gravel and sediment,
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: for only the faintest chance of finding a usable stone, European diamond cutting techniques developed gradually and unevenly across this period.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the earlier centuries, European craftsman were largely limited to polishing the natural faces of a rough diamond, a technique known as point cutting.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: which did very little to enhance the stone's brilliance, but did at least smooth its surface and remove some of the cloudiness of the raw crystal.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over time, particularly in cutting centers that developed in cities such as Antwerp, Bruges and later Amsterdam.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Craftsman began experimenting with more advanced techniques.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: One especially important development was the table cut, which emerged some time in the 15th century.
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a table cut, a Craftsman would grind away the top point of the diamond's natural octahedral shape, creating a single flat table-like facet on top of the stone.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a modest but genuinely significant innovation.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: because that flat table facet allowed light to enter the diamond more directly and created a small amount of internal reflection that had simply not been possible with earlier unaltered crystal shapes.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the table cut, European Lapper Daries, which is simply the term for crafts people who cut and polish gemstones, continued to refine their techniques over the following centuries,
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rose cut appeared sometime around the 16th century, featuring a flat base and a domed top covered in a series of triangular facets, producing considerably more sparkle than earlier cuts, though still nowhere near the brilliance we associate with modern diamonds.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not until the 17th century that a Venetian cutter, sometimes credited by name has been Chenzoparucci,
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: though the historical record on this attribution is not entirely certain, is said to have developed what became known as the Mazarin cut, an early precursor to what would eventually evolve into the modern brilliant cut, featuring a greater number of facets, arranged specifically to maximise the return of light, back out toward the view as I.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: This gradual centuries-long refinement in cutting technique matters enormously to the broad of story of diamonds, because it slowly transformed the diamond from a rare but visually unremarkable curiosity into the dazzling light-filled gemstone that would eventually captivate the modern imagination.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each incremental improvement in cutting
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: made diamonds more visually striking, which in turn increased their desirability among European nobility, which in turn increased demand for diamonds imported from India, tightening a feedback loop between craftsmanship and demand that would continue to intensify over the following centuries.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the supply side of the diamond trade was undergoing its own transformation.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Portuguese traders, having established maritime routes around the southern tip of Africa, and into the Indian Ocean by the late 15th and early 16th centuries, gained increasing access to Indian ports, and, through them, to the diamond trade that had previously
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This new maritime connection allowed a greater volume of Indian diamonds to reach Europe more directly.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Further fueling the growing European appetite for these stones.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1600s, the diamond trade between India and Europe had grown substantial enough to support entire merchant networks and specialised trading communities.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most famous figures associated with this era of the trade is a French gem merchant named Jean-Baptiste Tavenier, who made a series of lengthy and difficult journeys to India during the middle decades of the 1600s.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately completing six major voyages between the years 1631 and 1668.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tavenier's detailed written accounts of his travels
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Provide historians with an extraordinarily rich first-hand description of the Golkanda Diamond Mines and the broader diamond trade of this period, including descriptions of mining techniques, the scale of the labour involved, and the courts of Indian rulers where he conducted business.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tavenia is also closely associated with one of the most famous diamonds in history.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: a large blue stone that he acquired in India and later sold to King Louis the 14th of France in 1668.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This stone, originally weighing somewhere in the range of 115 carats in its rough uncut form, would eventually be re-cut into a smaller but still substantial stone that came to be known as the French blue.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following century and a half, this stone would pass through an extraordinary and at times dramatic series of owners, being stolen during the chaos of the French Revolution in the early 1790s, disappearing from the historical record for roughly two decades and eventually resurfacing.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: re-cut once again into an even smaller form, as what we today call the Hope Diamond.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Named after a 19th century British banking family, who eventually acquired it, we will return to the Hope Diamond's fuller story a little later in our episode, but it is worth planting that seed here.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since it illustrates so vividly how individual diamonds
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: theft and reinvention within their history.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the 1600s and into the 1700s, diamonds became an increasingly important marker of wealth and status among European royalty and aristocracy.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well beyond their earlier, more limited association with betrothal or marriage.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: elaborate court portraits from this period frequently depict monarchs and nobles adorned with diamond-studded crowns, necklaces, broaches and sword-hills, reflecting a growing cultural association between diamonds and the display of political power.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The French court under Louis the 14th, in particular.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: became closely associated with lavish diamond display, part of a broader strategy in which the king used extravagant personal adornment as a tool of political theatre, reinforcing his image as an absolute monarch of nearly unlimited wealth and authority.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, even as European demand for diamonds continued climbing steadily through the 1700s, the supply side of the equation was beginning to run into serious trouble.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The alluvial diamond deposits of India, which had supplied essentially the entire world's diamond trade for roughly 2,000 years, were gradually becoming depleted.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: after centuries of continuous extraction.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Indian diamond production once the singular dominant source for the entire globe began a slow and eventually quite steep decline through the middle portion of the 1700s.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This looming supply crisis might have severely constrained the growing European diamond market, had it not been for an entirely unexpected discovery on the opposite side of the world.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1700s, diamonds were discovered in Brazil, specifically in a region that would come to be known as Minus Gerai, a name which translates roughly to general minds.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first Brazilian diamonds were reportedly discovered around the year 1725.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Initially mistaken by local gold prospectors for a curious but seemingly unremarkable type of pebble until someone with the right knowledge recognised their true nature.
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brazil would go on to become the world's dominant source of diamonds for well over a century.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: effectively picking up the supplier role that India's aging deposits could no longer sustain.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brazilian diamond production peaked at various points throughout the 1700s and into the 1800s, and the country's minds, particularly around the town that would eventually be named Diamantina, in recognition of its association with the gem,
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: became central to the global diamond trade for generations.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth noting, with the same careful honesty we try to bring to every episode of this show, that diamond mining in colonial Brazil during this period, much like many other extractive industries throughout the history of European colonialism.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: relied very heavily on enslaved labour, a grim and important part of this history that deserves acknowledgement rather than being smoothed over in service of a purely romantic narrative about sparkling gemstones.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the middle of the 1800s though, Brazilian production too had begun to show signs of decline, and the world's diamond supply once again seemed
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Precisely at a moment when European and increasingly American demand for diamonds, driven by centuries of accumulated cultural association between diamonds and wealth, romance and status, was continuing to grow.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was against this backdrop of tightening supply and rising demand that the next great chapter in the history of diamonds would unfold.
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time on the African continent, in a discovery that would utterly transform the scale, structure and economics of the entire global diamond industry.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story of African diamonds, and with it, the story of the modern diamond industry as we would recognise it today, begins in the year 1867, along the banks of the Orange River, in what was then a loosely defined and sparsely settled region of Southern Africa.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the most commonly told version of this story,
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A young boy named Erasmus Jacobs found an unusually shiny pebble near his family's farm, close to the town of Hokedown.
• 25:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stone eventually made its way to a traveling trader.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And from there, into the hands of people, with enough expertise to recognize it for what it was.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: a diamond weighing approximately 21 and a quarter carrots.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This single stone, which came to be known as the Eureka diamond, set off a wave of curiosity and investigation across the region.
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Prospectors began combing the river banks of the orange and vowel rivers, and within a few years, additional diamonds were being discovered with enough regularity to confirm that this was not simply a one-time fluke, but evidence of a genuinely significant diamond-bearing region.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1871, Prospectors made an even more consequential discovery, a short distance away from the
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: on a hill, on a farm, belonging to two brothers, named Johannes and Diedrick DeBeer.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Diamonds were found not just scattered along a river, but concentrated within the rock and soil of the hill itself, revealing the presence of an underlying Kimberlite pipe of extraordinary richness.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This discovery triggered what became known as the Kimberly Diamond Rush, named after the settlement that rapidly grew up around the site, which had quite fittingly taken its name from the British colonial secretary of the time, John Wodehouse, the first Earl of Kimberly.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within just a few years, tens of thousands of prospectors, fortune seekers and laborers flooded into the area, transforming what had been a relatively quiet stretch of farmland into a sprawling, chaotic mining settlement almost overnight.
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mine that developed on the site of the DeBeer Brothers farm became known, somewhat informally at first,
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then quite officially later, as the big hole on account of the sheer scale of excavation that occurred there over the following decades.
• 27:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time large scale mining eventually ceased,
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The big hole had grown to a depth of over 200 meters, and a surface diameter of roughly 460 meters, and it remains, even today, one of the largest hand-dug excavations in the world, a genuinely staggering testament to the sheer volume of manual labour poured into extracting diamonds from that single site.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In these earliest years of the Kimberly Rush, the mining operation was structured in an almost chaotic decentralized fashion.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The land had been divided into an enormous number of small individual claims, each measuring roughly 9 meters by 9 meters, and these claims were owned and worked independently by thousands of separate prospectors.
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: each digging downward at their own pace and by their own methods.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This arrangement created serious practical problems almost immediately.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: As different claim holders dug down at different rates, the narrow pathways separating individual claims became increasingly unstable, prone to collapse, and genuinely dangerous.
• 29:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It also meant that the overall mining operation lacked any coordinated system for managing drainage, ventilation, or the removal of excavated material, all of which became progressively more difficult as the mine grew deeper.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was into this chaotic and fragmented environment that a young English immigrant named Cecil Rhodes arrived, having come to Southern Africa initially in search of a climate that
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: and finding himself almost by circumstance drawn into the diamond fields.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roads, along with a business partner named Charles Rudd, began quietly and methodically buying up individual claims throughout the 1870s, recognizing that the fragmented ownership structure of the mine was fundamentally inefficient.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that genuine profitability would require consolidating many small claims under unified management and control.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rhodes was not the only person pursuing this strategy of consolidation.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He faced a significant and determined rival in Barney Bonato.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: another immigrant to the diamond fields who had built up his own substantial holdings within the Kimberly mine through a combination of shrew trading and aggressive acquisition.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the early 1880s, these two men, along with a handful of other significant claim holders, engaged in an escalating and increasingly high stakes competition to control an ever larger share of the diamond
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: This competition eventually culminated in 1888 when Rhodes and Barnato negotiated a merger of their respective diamond interests, forming a new consolidated company that Rhodes named DeBears consolidated mines.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a nod to the original farm where diamonds had first been discovered in such abundance.
• 31:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This merger effectively brought an overwhelming majority of South Africa's diamond production under the control of a single company, and it marked the true beginning of what would become for well over a century afterward.
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most dominant and influential monopolies in the history of global commerce Rhodes understood something crucial about the economics of diamonds that would shape the industry's structure for generations to come.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Diamonds are not like most other commodities, in the sense that their value depends almost entirely on their perceived scarcity.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than on any strictly practical or functional necessity.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: A ton of wheat has a fairly stable value tied to its usefulness as food, but a diamond's value is far more fragile and far more dependent on maintaining an ongoing sense that diamonds are genuinely rare and precious.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the South African mines were allowed to produce diamonds at their full potential capacity, flooding the world market with a suddenly abundant supply, the price of diamonds could collapse dramatically and quite quickly.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rhodes recognised that debiers needed to carefully and deliberately control the flow of diamonds reaching the world market, releasing them at a measured pace, calibrated not to what the
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: but to what the market could absorb without price is falling.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This basic strategic insight, controlling supply in order to protect and even inflate price, became the foundational principle underlying DeBear's business model for the following century.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decades, DeBears steadily expanded its reach and influence, eventually gaining substantial control, not just over South African diamond production, but over diamond mines discovered in other parts of Africa as well, including significant deposits found later in Namibia, in the Congo, and elsewhere across the continent.
• 33:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: by channeling the output of these various minds through a centralized selling organization.
• 33:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: DeBears was able to exert an extraordinary degree of control over the global diamond supply, effectively functioning as a single point through which the vast majority of the world's diamonds passed on their way to cutters, wholesalers, and eventually retail jewelers.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Labour conditions underlying this rapidly growing diamond empire deserve honest acknowledgement as well.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the Kimberley mines and their operations grew increasingly industrialised through the late 1800s.
• 34:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The labour force working these mines became heavily dependent on African workers, who were frequently subjected to deeply exploitative conditions, including compound systems that confined workers to closed labour camps for extended periods.
• 34:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Partly justified by mine owners at the time, as a security measure intended to prevent
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: but which also served to tightly control and restrict the movement and autonomy of the workers themselves.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: These labour practices rooted in the broader racial and economic hierarchies of colonial southern Africa would later evolve into and become deeply entangled.
• 34:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: with the systems of racial segregation that were eventually formalized under the apartheid government established in South Africa in the mid-20th century.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1900s, Debe as control over the world diamond supply had grown remarkably comprehensive.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the company had developed a sophisticated central selling organization through which the great majority of the world's rough diamonds were sorted, valued and distributed to a carefully selected group of approved buyers, known within the trade as site holders who would purchase diamonds through a highly structured and
• 35:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: tightly-controlled process.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This system, in various evolved forms, would continue to shape the structure of the global diamond trade for the remainder of the 20th century, and elements of it persist in modified form even into the present day.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yet even with this remarkably tight grip on the supply side of the diamond trade firmly established, DeBears faced an ongoing and quite persistent challenge, namely, ensuring that demand for diamonds, particularly demand from ordinary consumers, rather than only the aristocratic elite, remained consistently strong.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This challenge would become especially pressing during the economic
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it would ultimately lead to beers towards one of the most successful and culturally influential marketing campaigns in the history of modern commerce.
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A campaign we will explore in detail as our story continues.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, famous stones and the art of the cut.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we move forward into the modern era of diamond marketing and global trade,
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing to spend some time with a handful of the individual diamonds that have become genuinely famous throughout history.
• 36:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stones whose story is revealed a great deal about the broader currents we have been tracing.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We touched briefly earlier on the Hope Diamond, and its story is worth returning to now in Fuller Detail.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stone began its documented history as a rough blue diamond of roughly 115 carats, acquired in India by the French merchant Jean Baptiste Tavenier, some time in the 1660s.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and sold by him to King Louis the 14th of France in 1668.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The French royal court had the stone re-cut into a somewhat smaller triangular shaped gem of roughly 67 carats, which became known as the French blue.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and which the king reportedly wore on ceremonial occasions suspended from a ribbon around his neck.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The French blue remained part of the French royal treasury for well over a century, passing through the reigns of subsequent monarchs until the tumultuous years of the French Revolution.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1792, during a period of considerable chaos and lawlessness in Paris.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The French royal treasury was broken into over the course of several days, and a large portion of the crown jewels, including the French blue, were stolen.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stone essentially vanished from the historical record for the next two decades.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's whereabouts unknown.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: until a blue diamond of a notably different, smaller size, weighing approximately 45 and a half carrots surfaced in London in 1812 in the possession of a diamond merchant.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many historians and gemologists believe, based on detailed analysis of the Stone's unique color and characteristics, that this smaller London stone was in fact the missing French blue, re-cut into a new shape, specifically, in order to disguise its identity and make it more difficult to trace back to the stolen crown jewels of France.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This re-cut stone eventually passed through a series of private owners
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: until it was purchased sometime around 1839 by Henry Philip Hope, a member of a wealthy British banking family whose family name the stone has carried ever since.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Hope Diamond continued to change hands throughout the following century, developing along the way a reputation
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: likely more the product of sensationalised journalism than of any genuine supernatural phenomena, as a cursed stone, supposedly bringing misfortune, financial ruin, or even death to many of its owners.
• 39:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: This colorful reputation was significantly amplified.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: during the early 1900s by an American socialite named Evelyn Walsh McLean, who purchased the stone in 1911 and wore it prominently for decades, seemingly delighting in its dramatic reputation rather than being troubled by it.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, in 1949, the stone was purchased by the American jeweler, Harry Winston, who in 1958 donated it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where it remains on public display to this day, viewed by millions of visitors each year.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another diamond whose history stretches back many centuries is the Koi North, a name that translates roughly from Persian as Mountain of Light.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Koi North's early history is somewhat difficult to trace with complete certainty, with various historical accounts placing its origins in Indian minds, possibly as early as the 1300s.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though firmer documented references become available, beginning around the 16th century.
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stone passed through the possession of a long succession of Indian, Persian, and Afghan rulers over the following centuries.
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Often changing hands as the direct result of conquest, invasion, or political upheaval.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: reflecting the turbulent history of the regions through which it traveled.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Co-inore eventually came into British possession in 1849, following the British East India Company's annexation of the Punjab region, at which point the stone was presented to Queen Victoria.
• 41:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Upon its arrival in Britain,
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: the stone, which in its original form had a somewhat irregular cut that did not display particularly impressive brilliance by the standards of European cutting techniques at the time.
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was re-cut in 1852.
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: under the personal oversight of Prince Albert, reducing its weight from approximately 1951 carats, down to its current weight of roughly 105 carats.
• 42:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: In exchange for a substantial increase in its brilliance and sparkle, the Koeenor has since been set into several different pieces of British royal regalia over the years and remains part of the crown jewels housed in the tower of London.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though its ownership has remained a subject of periodic diplomatic discussion and dispute between the United Kingdom and several countries, including India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, each of which has, at various points, articulated a historical claim to the stone.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most famous diamond of the 20th century, at least in terms of sheer physical size, is the colon and diamond.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: discovered in 1905 at the premier mine in South Africa.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: In its rough, uncut form, the colon and weighed an almost unbelievable 3,106 carats, making it by a very wide margin.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The largest gem quality rough diamond ever discovered up to that point in history.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it remains among the largest ever-found even today.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stone was presented as a gift to King Edward 7th of Britain in 1907 by the government of the Transval Colony.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: was subsequently sent to Amsterdam where it was entrusted to a highly respected diamond cutting firm for the delicate and enormously consequential task of cutting it into finished gemstones.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The process of cleaving the rough-colon and diamond, meaning splitting it along its natural crystal planes in order to divide it into smaller, more workable pieces.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: was reportedly such a high pressure undertaking that the master cutter responsible for making the very first strike against the stone is said to have fainted immediately after successfully completing the cleave.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: and anecdote that, whether entirely accurate in every detail or somewhat embellished in the retelling, certainly captures the genuine anxiety involved in attempting such an irreversible action on a stone of such singular value.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Colenon was eventually cut into nine major stones,
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: known as Colen and the First, or the Great Star of Africa, weighs approximately 530 and 2 tenths carrots and remains to this day, the largest clear cut diamond in the world.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Set into the head of the British sovereign scepter with cross.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the crown jewels used in official coronation ceremonies.
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: These stories of famous individual diamonds illustrate something important about how diamonds acquire meaning and value that extends well beyond their basic physical properties as pieces of crystallised carbon.
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A diamond story
• 45:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: its journey through history, the hands it has passed through, the ceremonies it has witnessed becomes deeply intertwined with its perceived worth, in a way that is genuinely unusual among physical objects.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: This intertwining of narrative and material value would become an increasingly deliberate and carefully engineered strategy as the diamond industry moved into the 20th century.
• 45:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A period when the challenge shifted from simply controlling the supply of diamonds to actively manufacturing consumer demand for them on a truly massive scale.
• 45:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Forever campaigns, synthetic stones and the modern diamond world.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we move into the 20th century, the diamond industry faced a genuinely serious problem, one that had less to do with mining and more to do with human psychology and consumer behaviour.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early 1930s, in the midst of the severe economic hardship of the Great Depression, diamond sales around the world had fallen sharply.
• 46:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: DeBears, having spent the previous half century carefully consolidating control over the world's diamond supply, now found itself facing a market in which demand, rather than supply, had become the primary constraint on profitability.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: In response to this challenge, DeBears made a pivotal decision in 1938.
• 46:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: engaging the American advertising agency, NW, Aia and Sun, to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy aimed specifically at reviving and expanding consumer demand for diamonds, particularly within the American market, which by this point had become the single largest consumer market for diamonds in the world.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resulting advertising campaign
• 47:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: which began in earnest in the early 1940s would go on to become one of the most successful and enduringly influential marketing efforts in the entire history of modern advertising.
• 47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The campaign's central strategic insight was both simple and remarkably powerful.
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than simply advertising diamonds as luxury objects, the campaign worked to deliberately construct and reinforce a cultural association between diamonds and the specific deeply emotional milestone of romantic engagement and marriage.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Advertisements from this era consistently featured diamonds within the context of love, commitment and lifelong partnership, gradually cultivating the idea in the minds of an entire generation of consumers.
• 48:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: that a diamond engagement ring was not merely a nice option among many possible ways of marking an engagement, but an essential and almost obligatory expression of genuine romantic commitment.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1947, a copywriter working for the agency, a young woman named Francis Garity,
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: coined a phrase that would go on to become one of the most recognized advertising slogans in history.
• 48:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The phrase suggested that a diamond, unlike so many other material possessions, was meant to last forever, subtly reinforcing the idea that the permanence and indestructibility of the diamond itself served as a fitting symbol for the supposedly permanent and unbreakable
• 49:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: This messaging proved extraordinarily effective, and over the following decades, the percentage of American brides receiving a diamond engagement ring rose dramatically from a relatively modest figure before the campaign began to a large majority of all engagements by the latter half of the 20th century.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This marketing strategy was later extended with considerable success
• 49:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: most notably into Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, a market where diamond engagement rings had previously held, essentially no cultural significance at all.
• 49:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through a sustained and carefully targeted advertising effort, diamond engagement rings became firmly established within Japanese wedding customs, over the course of little more than a couple of decades.
• 50:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: a striking demonstration of just how thoroughly a deliberate, well-funded marketing campaign could reshape deeply held cultural traditions surrounding something as significant as marriage.
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even as this remarkably successful demand-side strategy was unfolding however, the diamond industry's control over global supply was gradually becoming more complicated and
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, Diamond deposits were discovered in a growing number of countries beyond South Africa, including significant fines in Russia, in Australia, in Canada, and in several other African nations, including Botswana, Angola, and Sierra Leone.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This expanding and increasingly diverse base of global diamond production gradually eroded Debeir's once-near total dominance.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: over the world's supply.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: forcing the company to adapt its strategies over subsequent decades in order to maintain its influential, though no longer quite so singularly dominant, position within the industry.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This period of expanding diamond production across several African nations also brought with it one of the more troubling chapters in the modern history of diamonds.
• 51:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beginning particularly in the 1990s, diamonds mined in certain conflict affected regions of Africa, including notably in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, became closely associated with funding brutal civil wars and armed rebel groups, who used profits from diamond sales to purchase weapons and sustain prolonged and devastating conflicts.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: These diamonds came to be widely known as conflict diamonds, or sometimes as blood diamonds.
• 52:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A term that entered mainstream public awareness, quite significantly, following international media coverage, and later a widely viewed feature film released in 2006.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: that dramatise the human toll of this trade, in response to growing international concern and pressure, representatives from diamond producing and diamond trading nations, together with the diamond industry itself and various non-governmental organizations, established the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme in 2003.
• 52:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: an international certification system intended to prevent conflict diamonds from entering the mainstream legitimate diamond supply chain.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under this system, participating countries agreed to certify that shipments of rough diamonds were conflict-free based on internationally agreed standards before those diamonds could be legally traded across participating nations.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the Kimberly process has undoubtedly helped reduce the flow of diamonds directly funding armed conflict compared to the situation in the 1990s, it is also faced considerable and persistent criticism over the years, for gaps in its definition of what qualifies as a conflict diamond and for enforcement challenges that have allowed some ethically troubling diamonds
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: to continue slipping through the certification process.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the most significant recent development in the history of diamonds, though, has been the emergence and rapid technical improvement of laboratory-grown diamonds.
• 53:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes referred to as synthetic or cultivated diamonds.
• 53:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Scientists had actually succeeded in creating small synthetic diamonds
• 54:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Using high pressure, high temperature processes that essentially attempted to replicate within a controlled laboratory setting, the same basic conditions of extreme pressure and heat that produce diamonds naturally within the Earth's mantle.
• 54:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: For several decades, however, these laboratory-grown diamonds remained primarily useful only for industrial purposes, such as cutting and grinding tools.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since their quality and size were not yet sufficient to compete with natural diamonds in the gemstone market, this change substantially beginning in the early 2000s and accelerating considerably over the following two decades.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: As advances in both the high pressure, high temperature method and an alternative technique known as chemical vapor deposition,
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and increasingly high gem.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Quality, chemically, physically and optically identical to natural diamonds in essentially every meaningful respect, since they consist of the exact same crystallised carbon structure.
• 55:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simply grown under controlled conditions in a laboratory, rather than slowly formed over billions of years within the Earth.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 2010s and into the 2020s, laboratory-grown diamonds had captured a rapidly growing share of the global diamond market, appealing to consumers for several distinct reasons, including their typically lower price compared to natural diamonds of comparable size and quality.
• 55:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: and their appeal to environmentally and ethically conscious buyers, seeking to avoid any association with the environmental disruption of traditional mining, or the lingering, though now more heavily regulated, concerns surrounding conflict diamonds.
• 56:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: This growing competition from laboratory grown stones has, in turn, forced traditional diamond mining companies, including DeBears itself, to significantly adapt their strategies, with DeBears notably launching its own laboratory grown diamond brand in more recent years.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A striking and somewhat symbolic shift for a company whose entire historical identity had been built so thoroughly around the promotion and protection of natural mind diamonds.
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we bring our episode gently toward its close tonight,
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth reflecting for a moment on just how remarkable the full arc of this story really is.
• 56:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A diamond begins its existence as an entirely unremarkable arrangement of carbon atoms, buried deep within the crushing pressure and heat of the Earth's mantle.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: for periods of time so long that they are genuinely difficult for the mind to fully comprehend.
• 57:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of history, this simple crystallised carbon has been transformed.
• 57:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Through the accumulated layers of mythology, craftsmanship, colonial exploitation, corporate strategy, and carefully engineered cultural meaning.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: into one of the most powerful symbols of love, wealth, and status that our species has ever created.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the quiet riverbeds of ancient India, to the violent Kimberlite eruptions that first carried these stones toward the surface, to the vast excavated pit of the Kimberly big hole.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: To the glittering display cases of modern jewelry stores, the diamond's journey reflects, in many ways, the broader arc of history itself.
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: our endless capacity for wonder, for exploitation, for craftsmanship, and for the construction of meaning out of the raw material the earth provides us.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this quiet hour with us tonight, drifting slowly through the long history of diamonds.
• 58:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are still awake, we hope you found something interesting in tonight's journey.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you drifted off somewhere along the way, that is exactly as it should be.
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rest well, and we will see you again soon.