Creator:
Date Created:January 20, 1955
Place Created:
Keywords:James Ballantyne Hannay
Context:THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY: MISCELLANY
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January 20, 1955
THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN WEEKLY
MISCELLANY
Diamond-Making
The centenary of James Ballantyne Hannay, born a hundred years ago, raises a puzzle for science which is still unsolved. This concerns artificial diamonds, to the making of whicn Hannav may have come nearer than others. There is some uncertainty about it, for although in 1943, after his death, some of his specimens were unearthed in a South Kensington museum, these being submitted to the infallible X-ray test for diamond crystal structure and found to be tiny diamonds, tbere_is the possibility that thesg s^rr^f* were merely mounted by Hannay. as patterns^of"what >f» j??!?.^ tft arhipvft-ScTiool textbooks which state that Moissan made diamonds by crystallising carbon from molten metals give no true picture. Not only was the X-ray test unavailable in Moissan's time but such a statement ignores those fifteen years of exhausting experiments of Sir. Charles Parsons in which enormous pressures arid all the resources of a great engineer failed to rnal^p diamonds.
One need but read some of those Royal Society papers in which Parsons described his efforts to appreciate the struggle which has gone on. Parsons also repeated the experiments of both Moissan and Hannay, but with no success in producing tiny diamond fragments.
A Dour Scot
Hannay's story is one in which atithr.r>«e ocicncc at times rivals anything in fiction. After a somewhat patchy education this dour Glasgow man had taken up chemistry, had become manager of a small chemical works, but then had resigned this job owing to ill health. While a poorly paid laboratory assistant's post which he then took would be expected to suit anyone suffering nervous debility, this could hardlv be said of his diamond-making struggles. To heat carbonaceous matter likj bone-oil under great pressure with lithium metal to absorb the hydrogen, Hannay tried stouter and yet stouter tubes of wrought iron to avoid the explosions which at times severely damaged his furnace. Some of these tubes were powerful ingots of Low Moor iron made by CammeU and Company, predecessors of the Birkenhead shipbuilders, with a half-inch hole bored down the centre and closed after charging with an enormous blacksmith's weld.
Hannay himself told of the nervous strain while waiting for the expected explosion: of his sickness after the expected had happened. From 50 of his thick tubes only two or three survived the great pressures, these yielding the tiny black fragments which Hannay believed to be diamond.