The Shocking Story Behind the Diamond Engagement Ring

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Listen to find strength in community on the MG journey on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is our American Stories, and our next story is about a gem. It turns out diamonds haven't always been rare stones. Since 1870, 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 market would be saturated if they didn't do something about it. So in 1888, they set two audacious goals. One, monopolize diamond prices by creating De Beers mines.

De Beers would then be able to stabilize the market by creating both the supply and the demand for diamonds worldwide. Tom Zollner 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.

My name is Tom Zollner, and when I was 32 years old, I entered into what is a fairly common rite 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 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 bought a—her name is Ann—was Ann. 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 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 used 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. 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 deeper and a little bit different than I did when I was researching what to buy.

I wanted to know, well, where did this come from? And so this took me on what you might call a quest. It lasted for 18 months, and in that time I went to 16 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 poorest countries on the globe. It produces—it ranks number 10 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 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 called the kimberlite.

And so you find them in the river bottoms. It's some of the most primitive mining imaginable, and some of these diamonds emerging from such miserable conditions still find their way to the U.S. 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 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 birthplace and still the headquarters of the synthetic diamond industry, a way that machines have been built to recreate the heat and the pressure in 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 these shiny pebbles have been sold to Western consumers through the genius.

And I say that word with a certain amount of respect, but also advisedly. The genius of the corporation called De Beers Consolidated Mines, which cornered the market in South Africa in the 1890s, thanks to the scheming of an Oxford graduate named Cecil Rhodes, for whom the Rhodes scholars are named. Cecil Rhodes founded the De Beers 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 Beers 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 Beers Corporation that created this idea out of whole cloth and invented custom that a young man is supposed to spend two months of his salary on his sweetheart's engagement ring. That turned out, it sounds like something from Charles Dickens, but it's actually a complete marketing fable. And it was also out of the De Beers Idea Factory with the help of a New York ad agency called J. Walter Thompson. 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. And the ads all centered around the idea of temporality and of mortality and of 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 could two months salary last forever? A diamond is forever. De Beers. So, just to give respect where respect is due, there is something chemically unique about a diamond. As it goes on the Mohs scale of density, it is a 10 out of a 10 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 why a diamond sparkles so well. The speed of light at 186,000 miles per second has slowed down to 77,000 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.

I have no issue with that. But to slow down the light in some ways is 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 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 De Beers 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 at the heart of the book that I wrote called The Heartless Stone.

And you've been listening to Tom Zollner, journalist and professor, his book The Heartless Stone, the story of the diamond here on Our American Stories. This July, premium entertainment's on us. Xfinity Flex unlocks access to shows, movies and music so you can always try something new for free each week. Like singing hits with Stingray karaoke, exploring shows from abroad with Acorn TV, sampling everything available on Max like season three of The Righteous Gemstones, falling in love with pics from Hallmark movies now and turning up with I Heart Radio's Hit Nation playlist. Discover new free content across the best streaming apps every week of the year. No strings attached. Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. We'll see you next time at REU hotels and resorts. Book today at cheap Caribbean dot com.