Domestic Diamonds

To the list of U.S. industries born or reborn out of wartime stress will soon be added one of the most obscure and unsuccessful of all: diamond mining. For a modest $175,000 Arkansas Diamond Corp. last fortnight sold its long-idle field in Pike County, only one in the U.S. ever developed commercially. The buyer: an anonymous Chicago syndicate which hopes that wartime demand for industrial diamonds (up 60%) and wartime prices (up 20-70%) will enable it to succeed where others long have failed.

The Arkansas field was opened in 1906 by a guide named John Huddleston, who found a 2 1/2-carat diamond washed out by rain from a volcanic crater which he had bought (giving a mule as down payment) for farming. Huddleston sold his land to Arkansas Diamond Corp. for $36,000, spent the money in a hurry, is now an old-age pensioner. At that he did better than his successors. Investors in Arkansas Diamond Corp.* and a small competitor that shares the field have sunk several hundred thousand dollars in equipment and operations. Out of the mines thus far have come only about 10,000 diamonds worth $150,000.

But the field's "blue ground" (same as the geological formations of some of South Africa's famed mines) covers 44 acres, extends at least 200 feet underground. Chief difficulty in operating it: the cost, at-U.S. wage rates, of washing the 14,500,000 lb. of clay and rock it takes to extract a single pound of diamonds. Since the machine tool industry uses diamonds (world's hardest mineral) for cutting, this difficulty would be unimportant if control of the world's diamond supply, now tightly held by a British monopoly, should ever pass into Nazi hands.

*Including Samuel W. Reyburn, now chairman of the Board of Associated Dry Goods Corp., and the late Thomas Cochran, a partner in J. P.

Morgan & Co.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.