RUBBED RIGHT: Moissanite & Silicon Carbide

When a popular artisan who has worked in lapidary since the 1950s suggests taking a closer look at their "grit of W choice, it's at least worth checking out.

- L.A. SOKOLOWSKI

Meet moissanite, also known as silicon carbide, a natural mineral (SiC) so rare that, until the late 1980s, it was believed only found in grains of primitive chondrictic meteorites pre-dating the formation of our own Sun but with a 9.25 Mohs rating, a close contender in hardness to diamond (10).

Now that's interesting.

TURNING UP THE HEAT

The mineral is named after French chemist and 1906 Nobel Prize recipient Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan, one of the original members of the International Atomic Weights Committee and designer of the electric-arc furnace, which could attain temperatures upwards of 3,500°C (or 6,332°F).

Moissan used his furnace to volatilize, or evaporate, substances heretofore regarded as infusible and impossible to melt down. His work preparing new compounds helped lead to the discovery of the highly abrasive carborundum and afforded him the pursuit of his own theory that diamonds could be synthesized by crystallizing carbon under pressure from molten iron.

That's right. Monsieur Moissan is a grandperé of the artificial diamond.

In fact, the chemist misidentified natural moissanite as a diamond in 1893, while examining grains of rock samples from a meteor crater in Canyon Diablo outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The resulting dent in the Earth, nearly a mile wide and 750 feet deep, according to The Barringer Crater Company, was created when a meteor, estimated at 300,000 tons and traveling 26,000 mph, struck with 150 times the force of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and blanketed the desert for a mile in every direction with pulverized melted rock mixed with fragments of meteoritic iron.