From the Vault: The Nature of the Diamond, Part 1
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday, so we are heading into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is part one of our series on Diamonds, originally published January 16th, 2024. Let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪♪♪

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today we are going to begin a multi-episode dive into the world of diamonds. So...

So diamonds, this is a topic that it's probably been in sort of the background for a while. We've considered, you know, we know that there are a lot of interesting things about diamonds. But I know for my own part, there was like this surface level resistance to covering diamonds because the first thing that comes to mind is just sort of like the...

ubiquitous vision of diamonds that you encounter in diamond TV commercials. And it just kind of, you know, it certainly drives home this idea that diamonds are something everyone wants. Diamonds are something everyone needs, but also diamonds end up looking like just this ridiculously mainstream square thing. And I'm just resistant to the idea that there might be anything cool about them. The elegance, the grandeur, the luxury. Yeah, yeah.

But when you dive deeper, both in terms of the subject matter and also the history of diamonds, there's a lot more there. And so we have a number of different angles to approach in this series, including some basic reminders about what diamonds are.

But, yeah, I thought a nice way to sort of kick this off would just be to talk a little bit about just like how we perceive diamonds. Not even like, you know, overtly, like let's sit down and think about diamonds, but just sort of like, you know, subconsciously how we've grown up processing them, you know?

Because, yeah, they're highly referenced in our language. You know, they're valuable, obviously. Why are they valuable? Various answers to that. But for my own part, I was thinking about growing up, diamonds were, first of all, something that, you know, my mother, various female members of the family had, but they were too precious for me to touch or look at too much.

And then if you did look at them, and I have to acknowledge this will vary depending on your family's particular jewels, but they never looked like much to me, especially as a kid. I'd look at one and it's like, okay, it's a little speck of nothing. But then the light catches it just right. And it's brilliant. It's amazing. But then you look back at it. Okay, no, just a little rock or something. And then watching movies, I would know two things about diamonds. First of all, they're super valuable because people are always trying to steal them.

And once you steal them, you can just like turn them in for money somewhere, I guess. And finally, and this often is seen in the same movies,

You can take a diamond and cut through any pane of glass instantly by tracing a circle on that pane of glass, you know, and it just neatly falls out into your hand or use a little suction cup to pull it out, right? I assume that's not really true. It doesn't work that way. Have you ever looked into that? I believe this has been myth busted. Oh, okay. So do not attempt. But it looks super easy in various caper films and TV shows and cartoons. Yeah, I'm trying to think about my...

the early significance of diamonds to me, apart from them just being like a cash equivalent MacGuffin in, you know, high stories and stuff. You know, the bad guy in the movie always wants the diamonds. Get me the diamonds. In real life, I remember when I was young, I think I was a little confused about the difference between a diamond and a glass prism because they looked the same to me. And the glass prism was bigger and could cast, you know, the rainbows all over the wall and

And so it wasn't quite clear to me, I guess, what was better about this really tiny diamond as opposed to the huge diamond hanging in the window. Yeah, because the prism, like you said, is a lot bigger. It seems to work a lot better. We'll have a caveat on that in a bit. But then more to the point, super cheap. You can buy prisms all day, you know, especially the plastic variety, and you're not going to break the bank.

But then again, apart from just the knowledge that a lot of people had them, you know, on like their engagement ring or their, or their wedding ring, I guess, usually engagement ring. I didn't really have much real world consciousness of them. They were, they were primarily something in fiction. Yeah.

And then again, the TV ads too, though, I remember thinking as a kid, it's like you'd see these images of like, all right, you're in love, you're married, you need to give more diamonds. And part of you kind of like asked the question, wow, if I'm ever a married person, will I just be buying diamonds all the time? Like I've apparently got to buy the first diamond and then just diamonds every year thereafter. Yeah.

But, yeah, I think it's amusing that diamonds can be so all over the place. You know, they're valuable, but they can also seem kind of plain and lame. They're sparkling. But also sometimes the way that we describe them and think of them, they may be imbued with spiritual truth. They might be a physical manifestation of love.

Yeah.

Perhaps this weirdness, at least for me anyway, I think maybe for a lot of like film viewers of the time, you might think back to a very memorable scene in Superman three in which Christopher Reeves Superman picks up a chunk of coal and crushes it in his fist and then opens his fist to reveal not only a diamond, but a fully cut diamond. So it's got the what the facets on it. That's not how diamonds come straight out of the earth.

Well, yeah, I mean, of course, they're usually not made by Superman. So I guess with Superman, everything's fair game. He would do this in the comics, too. Apparently I had to research this, but this is a Superman gag that goes way back. I don't know if he ever like makes any use of it or is just kind of like he's always just kind of showing off maybe to one up Jesus. I'm not sure. But but yeah, he'll just crush that coal, open his fist. Bam. Diamond priceless. Already cut. Ready to go.

It makes me wonder about a Superman plot line where the villains are like diamond cartels that are worried Superman is going to increase the supply too much. Yeah. Or like villains who are like, oh, no, Superman's on his way to shut down our operation. Like, quick, spread toll everywhere just in case he just haphazardly makes a few diamonds. We may come out ahead in the end. But yeah, to your point, he could like Goldfinger the diamond market, couldn't he? Yeah.

Oh, no, wait. That would be a reverse goldfinger. That's right. It would be a reverse goldfinger, yes.

So, yeah, I had this scene popping around my head. I had the diamond commercials and those diamond commercials. Again, they try to convince you even at a young age that diamonds are life. Diamonds are everything worth having in life. They reflect life. And that's why I think it's going to be great that our first major avenue of investigation here concerns another idea that the diamonds just might be death.

Right. So this is actually what first got me interested in the topic of diamonds for a series today. I wanted to begin by looking at a weird question. And the question is, are diamonds poisonous? So to be clear, like this is not getting into very valid discussions of things like blood diamonds and all. This is the idea that there is something about the diamond that is in and of itself poisonous to the human body. Yeah. Poisonous if ingested in one form or another. Right.

Now, before we get to the answer to this question, I need to back up and explain the origin of the question, which is that a few months ago, you may remember we were doing a series on the shadow, the shadow in history, art, science and so forth. I think this was during the last October series.

And one of the things we ended up talking about in that series on the shadow was an optical effect known as the Heiligenstein. This is a real world phenomenon in which people sometimes see the shadow of their own head surrounded by a bright halo of light when they happen to be standing over a field of grass in the early morning. And there might be other conditions that create the same effect, but that's one of the most common ways people see it.

Now you can go back and listen to that episode if you want the full explanation of how this halo arises from the interplay of sunlight, grass, and dew. The relevant fact about it for today is...

is that the Heiligenschein is also sometimes called Cellini's Halo. And it gets this name from one of the early figures to notice and mention it in writing. And that is a 16th century Italian goldsmith and sculptor named Benvenuto Cellini, one of the weirdest and most fascinating characters I have come across while researching for this show. I am fascinated.

full steam ahead on the Benvenuto Cellini train. Now, I kind of want to go back and like read the entire memoirs. I might do that. So Benvenuto Cellini lived from 1500 to 1571. And though he is remembered for his artworks, which include an almost absurdly ornate golden salt cellar. We talked about this when he came up in that previous episode.

He made that for Francis I, the king of France at the time. And also a large bronze sculpture of Perseus holding up the severed head of Medusa, which is one of the sculptures in the covered gallery that's at the edge of the Piazza della Signora, which is the big square in the center of Florence.

Rob, I've got a picture of both these artworks for you to look at here if you want. While he is known for these artworks, he is known today, I think, at least as much for his bizarre, fascinating, grandiose, and almost certainly heavily embellished autobiography, which is just packed full of these weird, passionate, rousing tales, primarily about how awesome he is,

We get stories of Cellini lauded by kings and queens for his unique genius. Cellini visited by angels who write secret heavenly words on his forehead. Cellini single-handedly fighting off gangs of bandits. Cellini falsely imprisoned. Cellini hatching and executing a daring prison break from Castle San Angelo in Rome.

And even in describing the Heiligenstein, the glow around the shadow's head, Cellini seems to believe it to be a sign of God's special providence toward him rather than like an optical effect that anyone would experience in the same circumstances.

But as I recall from the previous episode, he was like, many people have observed this. When I asked them, they're like, yes, I see the halo above your head, around your head. You are chosen by God. Clearly, we all agree. Yeah, I showed it to other people and they believe me. In fact, this is a theme I've noticed in the parts of his memoirs I've read. He often is like somebody else saw the thing I did and they agreed that it was magnificent and they told me I was special.

So, Rob, I thought you would appreciate this, too. We also get a story of Cellini meeting at least one mythical monster in the story, which is the salamander. So when Cellini was a child of five years old, he tells that his father was playing the viola beside a fire of oak logs in the basement of their house.

when his father saw something in the fire and then made his children come and look, and little Benvenuto saw a lizard dancing in the heart of the flame. And his father told him that it was the mythical salamander, the elemental beast of fire, and he saw it. Oh, excellent. You know, now that I've thought about it a little bit, I think tomorrow's monster fact may have to be the salamander, but...

But real quick, I think that I have read before that some of these myths about the salamander, and again, we have to point out like a duality here. There's this idea of a mythical fire lizard, and then there's the actual salamander. And the connecting tissue seems to be that there were accounts of burning damp logs that

And in reality, either contained a salamander or, you know, had a salamander clinging to the underside of it. You'll frequently find salamanders in, you know, boggy or marshy environments underneath such a log. But if you were to take such a log, throw it on the fire and you would see some sort of little creature squirming there. Oh, it's it's some sort of it's clearly it's made of fire. That's why it's in the fire.

No, it's just a salamander that was on the log you threw in. Now, while you're throwing in super damp logs, I don't know, maybe you just don't have a lot and maybe the fire is fully raging at that point and therefore you can throw something a little damp on there. That is an interesting possibility. I hadn't thought about it that way. But yeah, maybe somebody actually did accidentally get some salamanders in the fire. More on that tomorrow. More on that tomorrow. Okay, okay. In the case of this story, having read it from the autobiography, I really can't tell

if this is something that makes more sense as there actually was some sort of creature in there and they just misinterpreted what it was, or if, I don't know, they were just looking into fire and seeing things in the shapes. That's one of the compounding factors here, right, is that humans love staring into fires. And if you stare into fires long enough, your imagination can allow you to see things. And then if you have a pre-existing cultural notion that there is some sort of

magical fire lizard in there. You might just see it.

Anyway, all of that to say that while Benvenuto Cellini is a fascinating and in some ways important historical figure, we should not take anything in his autobiography at face value as history or science. You just read it and you get the feeling even without, you know, comparing it to external evidence like, OK, there's obviously some embellishment going on here. But to come back to the diamond question, one of the many, many weird stories Cellini tells is

about his time in prison is about a supposed attempt on his life via poison made out of shattered diamonds. So to set the stage, in this passage, Cellini is hanging out in prison one of the multiple times he's imprisoned in the story.

He has just written a sonnet that will prove his innocence. Like he's written a sonnet that is so virtuous and indicative of his lack of criminality that he believes the constable had it sent to the Pope for review with the implication that like when the Pope sees this poem I wrote.

Then they'll have to release me because they'll know I couldn't have done it. But suddenly the friendly constable in the prison dies and he is replaced by the constable is replaced by his brother. And at this point, Cellini believes that a group of his enemies are

sort of like seize the moment and conspire to kill him by poison. And another thing is that Cellini is frequently making references to conspiracies of enemies against him. He seems to constantly think that he's got a bunch of enemies who are out to get him. And it's not exactly clear to me how much truth there is to this. There might be, but it's hard to tell. So he describes their plot as follows.

And the translation of Cellini's autobiography I'm going to read for here is by Thomas Roscoe. This was published back in the 19th century. So Cellini writes...

They at first thought of mixing with my meat the powder of a pounded diamond. This is not a poison of itself, but is so excessively hard that it retains its acute angles, differing from other stones, which, when they are pounded, entirely lose the sharpness of their particles and become round."

The diamond alone preserves the acuteness of its angles, hence it follows that when it enters the stomach with the meat, and the operation of digestion is to be performed, the

The particles of the diamond stick to the cartilages of the stomach and the bowels, and as the newly received food is impelled forward, the minute parts of the diamond which adhere to those cartilages in process of time perforate them, and this causes death.

Whereas every other sort of stone or glass when mixed with meat is incapable of sticking to the coat of the stomach and of consequence is voided with the food. This doesn't sound like a pleasant poison to take. No, this is horrible. No, he's saying that I don't. He's distinguishing it somehow from the concept of poison, which is.

I don't know. I mean, either way, it's something that ingested harms you. But maybe the other idea is that a poison is something that though I don't even I don't think Cellini and his time would have had these concepts, but it's killed by way of some like chemical metabolism where this this is killed because like literally it's just like pieces stabbing you on the inside. It's like swallowing a bunch of needles or something, except on an incredibly tiny scale.

So he's saying, you know, it's it's mechanically killing you from the inside rather than chemically killing you from the inside. And it truly does sound horrible. However, Cellini says that he escapes death from the intended plot as a result of his enemies bungling their plan.

So he says that one of the conspirators was the supplier of the diamond. So that conspirator gets the diamond and he gives it to another one of the conspirators who is supposed to pound it into a powder. And that powder is going to be used to poison him. But this second guy who was supposed to pound the diamond, being broke and greedy, kept the diamond and swapped it out for a different gem of lesser value, which

which he pounded and then handed over for the purpose of the murder. So here we pick up again with Cellini's narrative. He says, On the day that it was administered to me, being Good Friday, they put it into all my victuals.

Into the salad, the sauce, and the soup. I ate very heartily, as I had had no supper the night before, and it happened to be a holiday. I indeed felt the meat crash under my teeth, but never once dreamt of the villainous designs of my enemies. When I had done dinner, as there remained a little of the salad on the dish, I happened to fix my eyes on some of the smallest particles remaining.

I immediately took them, and advancing to the window, upon examining them by the light, recollected the unusual crashing above mentioned. Then, viewing the particles with attention, I was inclined to think, as far as my eye could judge, that a pounded diamond had been mixed with my victuals. So, Cellini knows he's going to die, and he prays to God. However...

Upon examining the grains further, he realizes that they're actually not quite indestructible to him. He can sort of crack and crunch them with a small knife. And that means they are not actually made of diamond. And because a diamond he thinks he would not be able to crush with this small knife, but this other gem he would. And then he says, OK, if there are another gem, they're not actually able to injure me. It would have to be diamond powder for it to work.

So I think he sort of like deduces the whole plot and how it was bungled here. But but oh, there's a good twist here, though. He he at first shows evidence of the attempted poisoning to another prisoner, a bishop of Pavia, who is in prison on account of, quote, plots and intrigues.

And he allows this bishop in the in the cell over to think that Cellini has been successfully poisoned with a real diamond and only has a few months to live and uses this to get the bishop to share his presumably better quality bishop food with Cellini. Yeah.

And by the way, this is by no means the only story that Cellini tells about plots against his life. It's not even the only attempted poisoning. There's another story where he claims that enemies tried to poison his food with mercuric chloride at the time known as corrosive sublimate.

Oh, man.

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So anyway, to come back to the question at hand, I was really fascinated by this story. And I wondered if there was any truth to Cellini's ideas about the lethal effect of eating ground up diamonds. And I'm going to get into some more details here. But as best I can tell, the answer is probably no. But I'm not going to get going to give a no with such confidence that you get the green light to go eat some diamond powder. I'd still be cautious about it. Yeah.

Yeah, do not do that. Because one thing that is clear is Cellini is far from the only person in history to advance this notion. It has been held by many in many different cultures, times and places throughout world history that eating diamonds is poisonous. Though, interestingly, it also in other contexts says diamonds have been regarded as medicine.

So to further explore this urban legend about diamond-based poisons, the best source I found was a book called Diamonds, an early history of the King of Gems from Yale University Press, 2018, written by a British historian named Jack Ogden, who seems to specialize in the history of jewelry.

Yeah, this is a great book. I've been reading this as well and will reference this in future topics we're discussing concerning diamonds. But yeah, Ogden is a gemologist in addition to an historian. So he knows his diamonds.

Yeah. And in the section on poisoning by diamond, Ogden says that as far as he can tell, there is no scientific support for the belief that diamonds are poisonous. As one of the early sources to write extensively on this subject, Ogden cites the famous 11th century Persian scientist and scholar Al-Biruni, who said,

who was one of the great polymaths of the Islamic Golden Age, famously a master of many, many disciplines. So he wrote books on extremely varied subjects, everything from mathematics to astronomy, history, geography, and ethnography. He apparently produced a very important medieval book on the culture of India. In one section, Ogden talks about how al-Biruni made a note of how appreciation for diamonds varied greatly by culture.

And so while diamonds were, he says, widely venerated for their ornamental value in India, he claimed that they were not equally venerated in neighboring regions like Iraq and Khorasan, which Khorasan at the time would have been a region corresponding to what is today parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.

And in these latter regions, Albiruni said that diamonds were only used for drilling and for making poison. But did Albiruni think that they were actually effective as poison? No. He offered several lines of evidence against the idea that pieces of diamond could be used as poison, the way that Cellini would later describe.

First of all, he mentions a kind of logical problem with how these poisoning plots are supposed to work. He says if people were fed pieces of diamond as a poison, quote, if it has not been ground well, it will be betrayed by the teeth of the eater. Oh, God, there's a lot of like cringe inducing ideas here from from from tooth eaters.

tooth trauma from crunching on a diamond to swallowing sharp things. Yeah, like even if it's gritty, you know, like that might be enough to make the target of your assassination either just send back the dish or it would raise their suspicion that someone was trying to poison them with diamonds, as we saw in our previous example. And certainly if the individual had a food taster as well, that would also cause

That would also be something that would tip your hand here and would alert your target that you were trying to do them in. Yeah. And interestingly, most of the old stories about poisonings via diamond powder concern very rich people in history, you know, and for, I think, probably obvious reasons that, you know, diamond powder is probably not cheaper.

So the people who were allegedly being poisoned by diamond powder were, you know, aristocrats, enemies of the Medici family, maybe, or kings and queens or popes or sultans, things like that.

But anyway, so Al Biruni is saying, presumably, if it were to be successfully snuck into someone's food, it would have to be pulverized into a very fine powder. But the second thing is Al Biruni cites experimental evidence. He says that he and maybe he or someone else tried feeding pieces of diamond to a dog and

and says that the dog showed no signs whatsoever of harm, neither immediately after the experiment nor any time later. He's like, you know, dog's fine. Oh, wow. Is this the titular diamond dog then? That had not occurred to me. I don't know. Now, that is some experimental evidence, though, on the other hand, that clearly would not meet the standards of a modern toxicology experiment. But but that's something something to look at.

Um, now I'll be Rooney. He puts all these considerations together and he says, you know, in the end there, there was no basis for thinking diamonds are poisonous. He says that it is all idle talk. It's tall tales, but that did not stop lots of other people from believing it. Uh, Ogden mentions an account written by the 16th century English politician, Jerome Horsey, who recorded comments made by the Russian czar, Ivan the terrible, uh, I believe this was near the time of Ivan's death, uh,

in which Ivan was going on about the godlike potency of the diamond. And he said, among other things, that, quote, the least parcel of it in powder will poison a horse with the implication, you know, how much more will it do to a human if it'll poison a horse?

And I just wanted to mention a footnote of Ogden's where he says, well, first of all, in this footnote, he says, you know, if you go trying to look up that comment of Ivan's, it is not in the edited published account of Jerome Horsey's travels in Russia, but it is in his manuscript from which the edited account was produced. But then finally, he says, quote, whether Ivan's example of a horse was a deliberate pun on Horsey's name is unknown. Yeah.

But Ogden also mentioned several records of people who allegedly attempted to commit murders by slipping diamonds into people's food. So one was noted by a 16th century Portuguese doctor named Garcia de Horta or Garcia de Horta.

who claims that a woman tried to kill her sick husband by feeding him ground-up diamonds, and that didn't work. Another account takes place in early 17th century England. It's some kind of very messy lover's dispute among aristocrats in which the wife of an earl wanted her marriage annulled so she could marry a different earl.

But the guy who she wanted to get married to had an advisor who disapproved of her. So she wanted to kill the advisor so she could go ahead with the marriage to this other guy. But apparently at one point in this caper, she sent an associate to an apothecary to buy diamond powder. It was like, you know, we've got to have the diamond powder for poisoning, you know, whatever it costs to get it. And the apothecary was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And she called him a fool.

And she was eventually able to poison the advisor, but it seems like it was historians think it was probably with a different agent other than than Diamond.

Now, Ogden mentions another 16th century physician, an Italian named Girolamo Cardano, who also commented on the use of diamonds as a poison and similar to Albiruni, cast doubt on the idea because he was like, you know, like there are cases where people steal diamonds by swallowing them and then later retrieving them.

And there is there's no evidence that they suffered any harm. Now, you might think, well, but those are like whole intact diamonds. Maybe maybe swallowing a whole diamond is fine, but swallowing the ground up diamond powder is what's really dangerous. And and Cardano also says he knows of at least one case where somebody had swallowed a big mass of diamond powder, quote, without prejudicing the health of the taker any more than if he had eaten so much bread. Yeah.

Though this does make me wonder, okay, assuming diamonds and diamond powder are not particularly poisonous, how do they generally affect digestion? Like I was thinking, you know, like is a diamond upset stomach a thing? Are diamond farts a thing? Well, certainly I can see where the concept would be alluring because, I mean, it's kind of like the diamond dog thing. Like the diamond has just such linguistic weight. You know, it brings with it all these connotations of obscene wealth and wealth.

and in splendor, and we combine it with something that could be considered lowly, like a dog, like the passing of gas, it instantly like zings in the brain, right? Yes. And that kind of points to another thing. So Cardano's comment about stealing or smuggling diamonds by swallowing them, it really kind of makes me wonder about this belief in the poisonous power of diamonds. Like if this belief about death by diamond ingestion is

could trace back to people trying to prevent diamond theft or diamond smuggling. You know, like, better not try to swallow it or hide it in your mouth. If you swallow it, it'll rip your guts apart. ♪

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Now Ogden kind of comes up short looking for recent evidence of experiments on the toxicity of diamonds. And he ends up having to look back to a letter written to the journal Notes and Queries in 1875, which claimed that, quote, the only possible way in which it, diamond powder, could be injurious would be as a mechanical irritant to the mucous membrane of the stomach.

So I was kind of wondering, are there any more recent studies on the toxicity of ground up of either diamonds in whole form or shattered diamonds or diamonds ground up into a powder? And I did not directly find any good toxicology research on this study.

I did come across another just sort of like a compilation overview in a book on nanomedicine written by an author named Robert Freitas, who has written a lot of information that's fairly available online.

In his work, Freitas collects a bunch of other claims from the history of diamonds, both claims of them working as poison, but also as medicine. And this author writing, I think, in the early to mid 2000s, like 2003, 2005, it looked like these sources were dated. This author basically says that the evidence from history is inconclusive and that he's also not able to find any good recent toxicology studies on diamond powder ingestion.

He does note that any abrasive gritty powder ingested in sufficient quantities can cause problems. Like if you just eat a bunch of sand, you know, you can get intestinal blockage. Obviously, if you have to be tuberculosis.

super gross here. But if you, you know, you eat like a needle or something that is long and sharp, you can get perforations somewhere in the digestive system. So a lot of thing, a lot of, you know, non food items, if eaten in sufficient quantities can hurt you. I mean, I guess even food items eaten in sufficient quantities can hurt you.

But he says it looks like there's not strong modern evidence that diamond powder in particular is dangerous. However, I would say that does not mean you've got the green light to go eat it. This guy's conclusion seems to be that there's not strong evidence that diamond powder is poisonous, but there's like enough concern that it would be worth studying to make sure, especially for people who are maybe exposed to it more often in their line of work. Yeah.

So to summarize my thoughts here, most of the actual accounts of diamonds used as poison, as opposed to, you know, accounts as opposed to just free-floating factoids about how diamonds work and what they can do, the accounts seem to be either unsubstantiated rumors or they conclude with the diamond poison not working or the details seem a little slippery.

However, the evidence on whether diamonds are poisonous does still seem to be mixed. It seems like it's probably not any more poisonous than any other abrasive, gritty powder. But we're far from 100% confidence on that. Plus, any powder in sufficient quantities could hurt you. So I'd still say it is probably better not to eat it. Yeah, there's just no reason to ingest it.

diamond dust. Like it's on one hand, yes, it probably won't hurt you, but just to be safe, don't do it. And don't poison people. Obviously that's, I think that's, that's, that's something we stand by here on the show. But even if you were in the business of poisoning people, this would not be a good poison. This would be nothing you could rely on. So don't do it.

Well, it makes me wonder about the sort of the literary appeal of the idea of diamonds as poison. You know, the same reason it like struck us as interesting to talk about this on the show is that it seems unusual and like an extravagant type of poison. So I almost wonder if in some of these stories where it was allegedly used as

to to poison people or to attempt to poison people it should make us question the facts of the narrative because this is like a potent image of somebody using an extravagant expensive luxury item to harm someone and it's like packed with meaning you know

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of irony to it. This is exactly the kind of thing. And I don't know, it's possible that either of these characters utilize some sort of fictional diamond poison at some point or another, but it's the kind of thing you could imagine Diabolic from Danger Diabolic using, you know, against his rich enemies. And likewise, for like modern film franchises, you could imagine the Jigsaw killer from the Saw movies using something like this. It's just

It would be the perfect ironic death for some sort of like a uber rich villain. Right. Right. Or for somebody like like Benvenuto Cellini, who is a goldsmith and a jeweler and a sculptor, somebody who worked with gold and jewels. I don't know if scholars of Cellini's life and memoirs would have thought.

More to say about that. But yeah, it seems like it seems fitting that his enemies would try to get him with a with a beautiful jewel that he might be something that he might have used in one of his works. Hmm.

All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and close out this first episode of our look at diamonds, but we'll be back on Thursday with part two. We're going to kick that off with some diamond basics. So if you're like, hold on, I still don't know what a diamond is. Don't worry. We're going to jump in with some of the basics at the beginning of the next episode, and then we'll get into more like weird and fascinating elements of the diamonds role and culture and belief and so forth. So it should be a fun ride.

ride. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Mondays, and

On Wednesdays, we do a short forum artifact or monster fact episode. I think we're going to put together one on the salamander for tomorrow. And then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

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♪ ♪

Yeah.

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