Diamonds Uncut

They're going to let me touch it with my hands. Watch carefully. Only time in my life I'm going to wash my hands in diamonds. We're now in the chief experts department and they have brought out some really special diamonds for us. Brought them out from a vault somewhere and I'm amazed by them. This one here is the biggest diamond that is here. 240 carats but it's rather a shapeless lump but down here there are some really amazing shapes. I never realized that a diamond when it's not even cut is a almost perfect octahedron. It looks like out of the text books. I just can't believe that nature can make anything quite so beautiful. If you look down here, you can see this one here is a bit yellow. I think because of an impurity. And then you can get some quite strong colors. This one here is purple and this one is pink. These ones here have grown into an almost perfect cube. And this little one is really, as far as I can see, a perfect cube. And then there's one that looks like a football. Very important. World Cup was here in Russia last year, though I don't play football myself. And then there's another one that looks like a skull, and if you turn it over, it's hollow. I think because it dissolved during the geological deposition, maybe in very high-temperature, high-pressure water that it dissolved, but it's got a rather strange bowl shape with eyes. Might be a bit grim having a diamond shaped like a skull on your ring. These ones here, I think perhaps, are chemically the most interesting. They're black because they're a combination of diamond and also graphite. We have a box with 1490 crystals of diamond. It's very interesting to me that they actually count them so carefully. You can see... Even these tiny crystals are all octahedral and if you look under the microscope you can see these little octahedra. I looked in the microscope, not very good in microscopes with my glasses, but even I could see that they were really nice and crystalline. This one here is a so-called twin. Where two octahedra have grown simultaneously in different directions. So you get a less interesting shape. And at the same time, I was fascinated that in this one, there's a crack. Diamond's such a strong material, but even so, sometimes it can crack. And then down here is an interesting crystal. Tiny, but it has three twins that have grown simultaneously. So you have six octahedra all close together. These are the different qualities of the diamonds. Some diamonds are clearer, nicer shaped crystals than others. And again, they have standards to make sure that they classify all of them correctly. Because once you've got a big box of them, if you've made a mistake, you have to sort them all over again. These diamonds are not completely pure carbon. They contain traces of nitrogen. You can't see this with the eye, but you can see it by using a UV light. So Natalia will just put the biggest diamond onto a UV lamp. And you can see, suddenly, it gives out blue light. And you can tell that different diamonds fluoresce different amounts. And occasionally, you can get a different type of nitrogen center, which instead of being blue, is yellow. So Natalia will show you one now, one of the cubic ones. And you can see it's a greenish-yellow color. Again, this is a really nice demonstration of spectroscopy. And you could analyze it even better looking through a spectrometer to get the precise wavelengths of the emissions. So here you can see there's a nice blue glowing octahedron. Can we try the pink diamond? You can see that one. It doesn't fluoresce at all, so it probably doesn't have any nitrogen centers in it, or at least none that will absorb. But again, this is a nice way of categorizing the different diamonds so that you learn more about their structure, learn more about their chemistry. Let's try the pink diamond as well. I think that's really interesting. The pink diamond fluoresces blue, but you wouldn't have guessed that. I'm in the sorting department. Where the raw diamonds are graded. It's really amazing. The diamonds that come here look rather like sand. If you look here in this bowl, I can just pour some out. But what's amazing is that people go through this literally grain by grain. They have about 8,000 different grades. Which they know, they remember, and they classify each of the grains according to the grade. And here we have about 26,000 or 27,000 carats. In weight of diamonds. The total value of this doesn't look very much. It's more than a million dollars. That's why people are watching me carefully. I'm wearing a special coat, no pockets. And even these tiny grains look like little octahedra, tiny crystals. And you've got to remember that these grains have been obtained from a solid mass of rock which has been ground up and out of the rock. 4.6 to 65.5, two brainers. Particularly interesting for me is that all of this is sorted by hand. Because they are so valuable that it's worth people looking at each one individually. That's why every diamond should be to you really special. Thank you. It's amazing. I've never seen anything like this. It's unbelievable. Thank you. I love it. They're going to let me touch it with my hands. Watch carefully. Only time in my life I'm going to wash my hands in diamonds. Feels just like sand. It's quite strange. It feels a bit like metal because diamond conducts heat very well. So it feels as if I'm holding metal. I think I could do this for quite a long time if they let me. But still, here you've got a million dollars worth of diamonds. Literally running through my fingers. Some of them are sticking to my hand. Make sure you get them off. No, you see, she's the... You got nothing on there? Yes, thank you. I'm mostly still able to speak. I can't hear you. I think this is the most extraordinary thing I've ever done on periodic videos. And certainly the most fun. The gold is an exciting element. It has interesting chemistry, and it's just sitting here doing nothing. It's enormously impressive, but it's a bit sad, rather like a mausoleum.