The Hope Diamond has a French connection, state-of-the-art computer imaging has found.
Using computer models, scientists recently compared the world-famous 45.52-carat diamond -- the most popular artifact at the Smithsonian Institution museums -- with the French Blue, a diamond that once belonged to King Louis XIV and was stolen during the French Revolution. Scientists have long suspected the Hope was cut from the Blue.
The Hope Diamond, on display at the Museum of Natural History.
(Dane Penland -- Smithsonian Institution)
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"The evidence very much supports the theory that it was cut from the French Blue diamond," said Jeffrey E. Post, curator of gems and minerals at the National Museum of Natural History. "It fit beautifully," he said, adding that this approach was "the most rigorous" ever applied to the Hope.
The new research will be presented tonight in "Unsolved History: Hope Diamond," on the Discovery Channel. The show airs at 9 p.m. and repeats tomorrow and Sunday. The investigators included Steven Attaway, an engineer and gem cutter, and gem-cutting experts Scott Sucher and Nancy Attaway. The work was done in New Mexico.
Historians, researchers and the public have been fascinated with the Hope for centuries. The world's largest deep blue diamond, it is believed to be more than a billion years old. Romantic popular legend has it that the diamond carries a curse.
The 69-carat French Blue comes from a 115-carat rock called the Tavernier Blue, which a gem merchant sold in 1668 to Louis XIV, who had it re-cut. Twenty years after the French Blue was stolen in 1792, a blue diamond two-thirds its size was put up for sale in London and was eventually purchased by banker Henry Philip Hope, in whose family the diamond stayed until 1901. Eventually the Hope Diamond was sold to Pierre Cartier in 1909, and then in 1911 to mining and publishing heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean. A famed Washington hostess, she kept the diamond until her death in 1947. The jeweler Harry Winston purchased it and then donated the diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958.
The researchers used documents, drawings and weight data of the Tavernier Blue, French Blue and the Hope. Then they created molds and computer models of the three stones to, in effect, place the smaller two back inside their larger predecessors. "They fit one inside the other," Post said. "It all made very good sense."
The researchers say they were also able to clear up some puzzles about the Hope. Its extra facets, for example, "match up perfectly with the French Blue, and when you cut away the triangular sides of the French Blue you get the exact shape of the Hope," Post said.
Post says the computer investigation showed that the method of cutting resulted in slivers, leaving not enough intact material to yield another mammoth diamond. "This is a new finding," he said.
The scientists say other old icons could be reexamined with rapidly evolving technology. "What is exciting is that we are constantly learning new information about our collections as we apply new high-tech research methods," Post said. "Even the Hope Diamond is grudgingly giving up some of its secrets."
