The Jewel Vault

Curses, frauds, and the criminal histories of the great stones

Julius Wodiska’s 1909 handbook is a sober guide to identifying gems — and, between the hardness tables, a cabinet of the strangest things people have believed, paid, and done for a pretty stone. Each one links to the page in the book where it is told.

1. Sicilian amber: $800 was paid for pieces "no larger than walnuts"; some glows internally a different color than its surface.Read it: Amber
2. "Amber riders": mounted men who follow the ebbing Baltic tide to gather amber; net-fished amber tangled in seaweed is "scoop stone."Read it: Amber
3. The word "electricity" comes from amber — Greek elektron, for its static spark.Read it: Amber
4. Cleopatra's signet ring was an amethyst engraved with the Persian deity Mithras.Read it: Amethyst
5. The amethyst (Greek amethustos, "not drunken") guaranteed the wearer sobriety "no matter how extensive his libations" — Bacchus's apology for a lost love. It was also held to prevent hailstorms and locusts.Read it: Amethyst
6. Queen Charlotte's amethyst necklace was worth $10,000; by 1909, maybe $500 — the market flooded.Read it: Amethyst
7. Bloodstone tradition: the red spots are drops of Christ's blood that fell on green jasper at the Crucifixion; immersed in water it was said to turn the sun's image blood-red and make the water boil.Read it: Bloodstone
8. The Duke of Connaught gave his fiancée a cat's-eye ring — and single-handedly spiked the world price of cat's-eye.Read it: Cat’s-Eye & Alexandrite
9. Alexandrite was discovered on Czar Alexander II's birthday and shows Russia's national colors: "an emerald by day and an amethyst by night."Read it: Cat’s-Eye & Alexandrite
10. Chrysoprase legend: whoever holds it can understand the language of animals — and the Roumanian river where Princess Trina found it "remains leek-green, as can be easily proved to any one visiting the place." Frederick the Great had two tables made of it.Read it: Chrysoprase
11. The ancients believed chrysoprase lost its color in contact with poison.Read it: Chrysoprase
12. The first South African diamond was a child's plaything — and was MAILED to the mineralogist in an unsealed envelope to save postage. His report: "It has spoiled all the jewellers' files in Grahamstown."Read it: The Diamond Discoveries
13. The "Star of South Africa" was traded away by a shepherd boy for 500 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse; the buyer sold it for ~$55,000; Earl Dudley later paid ~$125,000.Read it: The Diamond Discoveries
14. Tavernier reported 60,000 men working the Golconda diamond field in 1665.Read it: Diamonds of India
15. During the 1870s "Cape time," Amsterdam diamond cutters earned $200–600 a week — one cutter's father made $800 in a single week.Read it: The Diamond Cutters
16. London Syndicate rules: view the diamonds at a "sight" and decline to buy, and you were banned from purchasing for six months. In Amsterdam, a buyer who backed out of a sealed-envelope bid risked imprisonment.Read it: Sorting & Selling Diamonds
17. Diamonds stick to grease — the discovery (by De Beers employee Fred Kirsten) that only diamonds adhere to a greased shaking table revolutionized sorting. Only 1 cubic foot in 192 of concentrate reached the sorters.Read it: Working the Blue Ground
18. The Cullinan: 3,253¾ carats — over 1⅓ POUNDS of diamond. At the cleaving, the first steel blade BROKE against the stone; the second blow split it exactly as planned, to "a chorus of sighs of relief."Read it: The Cullinan
19. The British crown weighed 39 ounces — with 2,818 diamonds and 297 pearls — before the Cullinan stones were added; the Black Prince's ruby in it was worn by Henry V at Agincourt.Read it: The Cullinan
20. The Excelsior diamond's finder was rewarded with $2,500 — plus a horse, saddle and bridle.Read it: The Excelsior Diamond
21. The Regent diamond's history: hidden in a slave's leg wound, stolen by a sea captain who drowned him and later hanged himself; stolen again in the Revolution; later pledged to fund Napoleon's Marengo campaign and set into the pommel of his sword.Read it: The Regent Diamond
22. The Eugenie diamond was first offered to a village blacksmith as payment for repairing a plough — he threw it away.Read it: Jewels of Kings & Popes
23. Mohammed Ghori's treasury held FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS of precious stones, "acquired exclusively by plunder."Read it: Jewels of Kings & Popes
24. At a 1407 Burgundy banquet, the noble guests received cut diamonds as party favors.Read it: Jewels of Kings & Popes
25. Day-of-week gem rules: Tuesday (Mars) for rubies, Friday (Venus) for emeralds, Saturday (Saturn) for diamonds.Read it: Gem Folk-Lore
26. Medieval prescriptions: powdered diamond was a dentifrice AND a deadly poison (Burma); jet cured snake bites; onyx CAUSED nightmares; topaz averted sudden death; zircon "takes away sin."Read it: Gem Folk-Lore
27. The book jokes that turquoise wearers "will require no accident insurance, the stone having that power."Read it: Gem Folk-Lore
28. "Vital ore" — plain quartz sand — was still being sold as a cure-all in upstate New York in 1909.Read it: Gem Folk-Lore
29. Chalcedony worn "in contact with the hairs of an ass" prevented danger in tempests.Read it: Gem Folk-Lore
30. Navajo garnets ("Arizona rubies") are collected from ANT-HILLS — the ants haul them up — sometimes by U.S. soldiers.Read it: Garnet
31. Moonstone held in the mouth refreshed the memory — the book suggests it for "witnesses whose books have been burned"; during the waning moon it foretold the future — "the favourite gem of tipsters of the race tracks."Read it: Moonstone
32. "Paste" jewels are named for a person: Herr Strass of Strassburg, inventor of the lead-glass formula — hence "strass."Read it: Imitations
33. Fake pearls were made by coating glass beads with an essence of fish scales.Read it: Imitations
34. Reconstructed rubies forced the courts to legally define what a "ruby" is.Read it: Imitations
35. Kunzite (discovered 1903 in California) glows under radium — Sir William Crookes found it "runs the diamond very close."Read it: Kunzite
36. A test: real gems are colder than glass, and breathed on, fog thicker and clear faster.Read it: Imitations
37. Coral cements itself to whatever's on the seabed — stones, cannonballs, bottles, "and, as is recorded in one case of fact, a human skull."Read it: Coral
38. Most Italian evil-eye coral charms are fakes — but, the book notes drily, they are "equal to the genuine in efficacy."Read it: Coral
39. The Queen of Italy's parasol had a coral handle valued at nearly $2,000; Chinese mandarins paid "incredible sums" for fine coral cap-buttons.Read it: Coral
40. The opal's curse was blamed on a NOVEL — Walter Scott's Anne of Geierstein; Queen Victoria killed the superstition by giving opals to each daughter at her wedding (and boosting Australia's opal exports).Read it: Opal
41. Some opals (hydrophane, and tabasheer from bamboo joints) are opaque until dropped in water, when they turn transparent; crooked dealers oiled dull opals to fake their fire.Read it: Opal
42. The largest known pearl: 2 inches long, 4.5 inches around, three ounces (Hope collection, London). An American millionaire quietly paid $400,000 for a 37-pearl strand.Read it: Pearl
43. A perfect 10-carat ruby brings three times the price of a 10-carat diamond; a heated ruby turns white, then green — then red again as it cools.Read it: Ruby
44. One famous tri-colored sapphire was carved into a figure of Confucius: colorless head, pale-blue body, yellow legs.Read it: Sapphire
45. Blue-patched off-color sapphires were heated until the blue vanished — making sellable white sapphires.Read it: Sapphire
46. Topaz is named for an island so often fog-hidden that its name means "to seek"; colorless topazes were nicknamed "slave's diamonds," and Portugal's 1,680-carat crown "diamond," the Braganza, is probably one.Read it: Topaz
47. Pink topaz is baked, not born: yellow stones packed in magnesia and heated to "a low red heat" — the trade calls it "pinking."Read it: Topaz
48. Tourmaline's electric property was discovered by CHILDREN in Holland (~1703) whose sun-warmed playthings attracted ashes and straw — the stones were named "aschentreckers," ash-drawers.Read it: Tourmaline
49. America's tourmaline industry began with two boys who spotted a green gleam at a tree root on Mount Mica, Maine, in 1820 — over $50,000 in gems followed.Read it: Tourmaline
50. Ruskin on tourmaline's chemistry: "more like a mediaeval doctor's prescription than the making of a respectable mineral."Read it: Tourmaline
51. Burma tourmaline miners dig until "the foulness of the air puts the lamps out" — about 60 cubits down.Read it: Tourmaline
52. Never wash your hands wearing a turquoise ring: soap and water can change the stone's color.Read it: Turquoise
53. "Occidental turquoise" is fossil BONE (odontolite) — heat it and it gives off an offensive smell of burning animal matter.Read it: Turquoise
54. Queen Elizabeth's sardonyx ring, given to Essex as a life-pledge: the countess who withheld it confessed on her deathbed, and Elizabeth shook the dying woman — "God may forgive you, but I cannot."Read it: Onyx
55. Niagara Falls "satin spar" souvenirs were actually imported from Wales.Read it: The Occasional Stones
56. Zircon is the heaviest of gems — more than four times the weight of water — and its "Matura diamonds" pass for the real thing.Read it: The Occasional Stones
57. Staurolite's twinned cross-shaped crystals were sold as charms "fallen from heaven."Read it: The Occasional Stones
58. Jade: Dr. Bauer saw a piece under three cubic feet priced at $50,000; both Greeks ("nephros," kidney) and Chinese prized it as a kidney cure.Read it: Jade
59. Dr. Kunz: the modern supply of chrysolite (peridot) is "taken out of old jewelry" — mined from grandmother's brooches.Read it: Peridot
60. Amber was the Phoenicians' Baltic trade; insects trapped in it were already noted as proof it once flowed as resin.Read it: Amber