Article February 12, 2001 Issue

Diamonds or coal?

Those diamonds come out of your own mine.

By Lois Holmberg

You'd Think That two objects made of the same element—carbon—would resemble each other in some way. But coal is soft or semisoft, opaque, and has no brilliance. It's incapable of reflecting light.

Meanwhile, the diamond is one of the hardest substances known. It is transparent and acts like a prism. Though it has no inner beauty or brilliance of its own, when it's skillfully cut it reflects light in a beautiful way.

The opposite natures of these two chemically similar substances are mainly determined by the amount of impurities each one contains. The purest and most transparent diamonds are classified as being "of the first water."

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