Lynn Thompson age 9 of Spokane:
What are jewels made of?
Precious jewel stones are made of very ordinary minerals. The valuable diamond is made of carbon, the same mineral which makes sooty graphite. The priceless emerald is called corundum stone, It is a variety of beryl tinted green with chromium. Beryl is made of beryllium and aluminum. It may be tinted greenish, blueish, yellow, pink or clear! depending upon the extra materials added to the recipe. Opal is mostly silica, the mineral used to make sand and quartz.
Those billions of milky white pebbles on the beaches are made of quartz. This plentiful mineral also gives us purple amethysts striped agate: black onyx and shiny jasper of dark green, red and yellow, Quartz also forms clear rock crystal rose crystals and smoky crystals,
Some jewel stones are the fossil remains of long dead plants and animals Shiny black jet is formed from coal which started as trees in some ancient forest. Amber is also from the ancient forests of long ago. It is hardened gobs of resin from ancient conifer trees, Coral is the hard shell material formed by little sea creatures. And everyone knows that pearls are made by oysters from the materials it takes from ordinary seawater.
You can recognize the names of most of these minerals used in the making of precious jewel stones, Graphite is plentiful enough to be used up in millions of pencils every year. Chromium is plentiful enough to coat millions of faucets and adorn millions of automobiles, Aluminum and silica are two of the most abundant elements in the world. This makes us wonder why jewel stones are so expensive.
Most of them are cyrstal stones sparkling with dancing specks of light, Many minerals will form crystals under the right conditions. But it is a slow jobs for a crystal grows fragment by fragment, Each fragment is added bit by bit to the outside of the growing crystal, And it must be fitted into exactly the right place, Each mineral forms its own type of crystal, Its faces may be three aided four, fiv,e six, or eight sided. Each mineral always repeats the same angles in making every face of its crystal,
This patient work takes time. Nature takes millions of years to make precious jewel stones from her common minerals; This makes them rare and therefore expensive: The color of one of natures jewel stones may be beautiful enough to make it priceless,
Why can't we copy natures recipes and make jewel stones from ordinary minerals? We can, and these man‑made jewels are almost, though not quite as fine as nature's own. An expert often needs his special glasses to tell a man‑made jewel from a natural one, Then he sees, that layers show up in the hurry ‑up, man‑made crystal. Such a crystal is liable to contain pockets of air, whereas the natural jewel will have only pockets of liquid.
As jewels, these man‑made stones are not as perfect as nature's, But man‑made rubies work fine in watches and other precision instruments, And man‑made diamonds are hard enough to be used as drills.