James Ballantyne Hannay,

Synthetic Diamond Pioneer

by David Harvie FSA Scot

One of Glasgow’s best-known Italian delicatessens was once a metallurgist’s laboratory. Here, while perfecting anti-fouling compounds, galvanic batteries and methods of treating various physical aliments, the 25-year-old James Ballantyne Hannay also became, over a century ago, the first to succeed in producing manmade diamonds. Or did he?

For centuries, the allure and rarity of diamonds provoked profound desire and greed amongst the already wealthy. Later, the industrial age imposed its own demands on the mysterious mineral. Diamond is the hardest natural substance, formed from carbon in the high-pressure furnace of the Earth’s core. It is chemically inert, useful in optics and has important thermal and electrical properties. Before the advent of modern technology, the search for artificial diamonds became an obsession. Unlike the ancient alchemists, those who sought to produce manmade diamonds were not driven by any mystical philosophy or by the need to resort to devious fraud. But respectable scientists and engineers wasted fruitless years and huge fortunes in the unsuccessful effort to reproduce the enormous temperatures and pressures required to convert carbon into its diamond form James Ballantyne Hannay was born in Glasgow in the wee small hours of January 1, 1855, and immediately made history. He was mostly likely the first person to be subjected to a compulsory registration system under a new Scottish statute w/rich had come into effect at midnight. The family lived in Kelvingrove Street, near the park, and his father was a master baker tamed property developer. In his childhood, Hannay was something of a prodigy, with an interest in chemistry, philosophy and astronomy. He had his own laboratory at home and made fireworks and special effects for the Prince of Wales Theatre in Cowcaddens, which had been built by his father. The family clearly prospered, and a move was made to Cove Castle on Loch Long, some 45 miles from Glasgow.

As a teenager, Hannay worked in the infamous, noxious, east-end Shawfield chemical works of John Campbell White (later Lord Overtoun) before taking a position as demonstrator and lecturer at Anderson’s University, the institution which was the forerunner of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College and Strathclyde University.

By the age of 24, Hannay had his own chemical works at Sword Street in Glasgow’s Gallowgate, and he opened a laboratory in what was Great Clyde Street. The site is now known as 234 Clyde Street and has for many years been the premises of Fazzi’s Italian delicatessen and restaurant, one of Glasgow’s institutions.

Over many years, Hannay registered more than 80 British patents, covering a wide range of interests and activities, including anti-corrosion compounds for treating wood, metal and stone; batteries; railway couplings; fire extinguishing apparatus; and a gold and silver extraction process. He formed Hannay’s Marine Appliances Company to promote these interests, later re-forming the company as Hannay’s Patents Company. He was especially interested in the solubility of solids in gases, and knew that many metallic oxides which were normally insoluble in water could be dissolved under great pressure. He decided to find a solvent for carbon.

In order to manage the necessary heat and pressures, he used wrought iron bars drilled out to form thick, narrow-bore tubes. He filled them two thirds full with a mixture of paraffin and bone oils, lithium and a small amount of graphite. The now very dangerous tubes were sealed by welding and heated red-hot in a furnace for 14 hours. This was an enormously dangerous procedure, and the vast majority of nearly 100 tubes exploded. However, three tubes withstood the pressures, and inspection showed a hard mass covering the inner walls. When the material was crushed and analysed, it was found to be crystalline carbon—diamond.

In February 1880, Hannay sent the samples (a series of small crystals, none more than half a millimeter in length) to Professor Story-Maskelyne at the British Museum’s Department of Minerals. Story-Maskelyne applied a barrage of analytical tests to the samples and pronounced the material indisputably to be diamond, a conclusion which he published in a letter to the London Times on February 20^th. Hannay had achieved what no man had done before.

A few years later, in 1893, the French chemist Henri Moissan (the inventor of the electric furnace) declared that he also had produced diamond by heating pure carbon and iron to a temperature of 4,000 degrees C. and then exerting great pressure by rapid cooling in water. Sir William Crookes confirmed Moissan’s work, but the whole issue was clouded in uncertainty when the equally eminent engineer Sir Charles Parsons squandered a fortune in repeated failures (his techniques apparently included, essentially, firing bullets at samples of pure carbon).

The status of Hannay’s samples remained untouched until 1939 when the eminent crystallographer Professor Kathleen Lonsdale conducted new tests at London’s Royal Institution using modem X-ray techniques and confirmed Story-Maskelyne’s opinions. She showed that some of the diamonds were pure, some had slight impurities, and that one crystal was not diamond. However, a year later in an article in the journal Nature, she said that, while the diamonds were real, she could not strictly confirm that Hannay had produced them. There was nevertheless nothing at all to suggest that he had not, either.

In 1952, attempts to reproduce Hannay’s results at Aberdeen University appeared successful, but scientific rigour discounted the procedure when some possible contamination was found in the laboratory (but not in any of the equipment used).

In 1962, matters took another turn when Professor Lonsdale overturned her original opinion. She now considered that the diamonds were wholly natural and that no man could possibly have succeeded in making diamond. Her original view had been coloured by an imperfect understanding of differing diamond types. This change of heart in one direction was balanced by two other experts changing their minds in Hannay’s favor. By this time, it seemed that not everyone believed that Hannay had succeeded, but no one could show that he hadn’t.

Another 15 years passed before the Hannay diamonds came under another new battery of tests, conducted at King’s College in London. This time, new techniques showed that the material was undoubtedly diamond, but that it was equally irrefutably natural diamond. This time Hannay could not have done it. Had he cheated? It was thought unlikely, and no one has offered any evidence to support the idea of deliberate deception. There are a number of possible routes which could explain accidental contamination of his experiments.

Incidentally, Hannay was an extraordinary character in other respects. All his adult life he was a dedicated student of Christianity and the function of the universe. He traveled widely and taught himself modem languages, theology, Greek and Hebrew. He published a number of volumes of theology, of which the principal was entitled Kosmas, The Eternal Ebb and Flow of Matter and Force Yielding Life Infinite and Eternal as to Time and Space. One of his obsessions was that the ancient Romans perpetrated an enormous fraud on literature and history by inventing the Hebrew language and tradition and thereby enslaved European culture.

It is an extraordinary feature of this story that every so often a re-examination of Hannay’s diamond samples has produced a result which appeared to conflict in some way with its antecedent. The final, definitive word was a very long time in appearing (and only then due to the availability of increasingly sophisticated techniques). As far as we know, the last re-examination of the samples was in 1975, by which time the fact of man-made diamonds was old hat.

The American physicist P.W. Bridgman’s work led to the production of synthetic diamonds by the General Electric Company at Schenectady, New York, in 1955. The Russians also had success with gas decomposition methods and the Japanese more recently with vapor deposition: In the last 40 years, man’s ability to produce very high-tech synthetic diamond for industrial purposes has proved extremely sophisticated. Recently, researchers at the University of Florida produced the world’s largest synthetic diamond: 11 inches in diameter and 1.5 millimeters thick, equal to 1,600 carats. One engineer involved said, "Once you get past the romantic notions, diamond is one heck of an engineering material." In that context, the image of the single metallurgist struggling alone in appallingly dangerous attempts to reproduce the work of nature within the bowels of the Earth seems wholly absurd.

But we should not forget the achievements of people like Hannay. By all accounts, he was a deeply committed and fastidious experimenter; and while he was trying to produce diamond by the most crude and dangerous methods, it is just possible to invest him with a touch of romance—whether he succeeded or not. In any case, while taking your prosciutto e melone, or just a small espresso in Fazzi’s in Great Clyde Street, there is a good chance of feeling the slightest tingling of the hairs on the back of your neck.