Diamonds

If you thought the sparkle on your finger was the only diamond in your life, then think again because industrial diamonds exist all around us, even the tiles on your toilet would probably cut with a diamond plate.

Top quality naturally occurring diamonds coast thousands of dollars, but an entire small dish of synthetically grown diamonds coasts around 50 dollars !! In fact, the majority of diamonds used in industry are grown synthetically.

Man made diamonds are first created in the early 1950s using high temperature and high pressure, and the basic ingredient .. Carbon !
In fact, giving the right conditions you can make diamond out of any type of carbon including bread tost !!
Once the bread is truly burned, it is grinded down and squeezed into  mold. Then, a special machine takes it to pressure 60000 time greater than our atmosphere, at which point the carbon naturally becomes diamond.

Natural Diamond Crystal, South Africa

Many diamonds are made this way to be used as abrasives, so plates and probes are coated with them. Several surgeons use diamond knives. It's in so many things because it's very very hard.
Hardness is measured with what is called "Moh scale", at the bottom of the scale we have soft things like wax, mid way along materials like steal but at the top of the scale is the hardest naturally occurring thing known to mankind .. Diamond.

Different types of diamonds have been developed which could see as using them in a hole new way. They made with low pressure, methane and hydrogen are taken at just 100 of the pressure of our atmosphere and heated until there is hot as the surface of the sun. This smashes the molecule apart and eventually produces diamonds. The results are tiny crystals which can be formed into some of the most amazing shapes : long thin wires and large flat plates that can be highly polished until you see trough like glass ! These plates of synthetic diamond are perfectly transparent and so tough that one spacecraft which traveled to Venus had windows made from them.

There are very remarkable properties of diamond as diamond has incredibly high thermal conductivity, it's 5 times higher than copper !! just as much as high electrical conductivity. The fact it can do this and that can dissipate heat quickly, means it's likely to be used in electrical devices in the future to give us fast speeds with small chips giving it another use in our lives.