April 2023 | Lab Grown Magazine

April 2023 | The Lab Grown Diamond Resource Book 22 Mailed to 24,000 Jewelers Monthly - To advertise call (888) 832-1109 | April 2023 23 Natural emeralds are also notably fragile. “They can break rather easily, but our emeralds tend to be tougher. And for a smaller price, we can give a better quality of stone that’s calibrated and properly cut. We do have certain advantages over natural gemstones, yet we constantly stress our stones are identical to the natural gemstones in composition,” Chatham noted. How did the Carroll Chatham story begin? “The ‘HolyGrail’of crystal growth has been diamond. And, that’s exactly what Carroll Chatham was trying to do in his earliest of endeavors. But, growing a diamond requires a very dangerous environment - high pressure, high temperature… After almost blowing-up his father’s house, he changed his goal to growing emeralds, ” Tom Chatham said. Matching natural colored gemstones like blue sapphire, especially in multiples, is extremely challenging. For example, how close can you grow a dozen blue sapphires? “We’ll cut twelve blue sapphires that are identical, or close to identical.  That’s a key difference between the mined and man- A 16x13 emerald-cut Chatham created emerald, 10.80 cts., with lab-grown diamond accents, 1.17 ctw. Photo: Chatham, Inc. made gemstone industry. We’ll try to satisfy the needs of the industry versus satisfying miners’ pocketbooks. We lose a lot of yield, carat wise, but gain a lot of customers in doing so,” Chatham said. In the earlier years at Chatham, Inc., their success with emerald growth allowed them to focus on the ruby, followed by blue sapphire. Yet each gemstone growth process had its own set of challenges and complications. “Blue sapphire was extremely difficult. At first, we couldn’t figure out how to grow it,” recalls Tom Chatham. “Ruby has chromium, blue sapphire has iron and titanium and they can cause certain things in the crystal to ‘go bad.’The crystals can come out black, or they would come out colorless. We spent years and years to fix that.” How did Chatham expand to the assortment of gemstones you now offer, loose or set? “Since we felt so inept at growing blue sapphire, we said, ‘let’s go sideways and look at other members of the corundum family.’ We found there are other things involved with growing blue sapphire that were not involved in growing orange sapphire, pink sapphire, or white sapphire, for example, but we finally figured it out. Then we went on to grow alexandrite and opals,” Chatham said. You have a fondness for a certain photograph of your dad. Please explain why. “We have very few photos of my father especially in the lab setting. All the lab shots were gleaned from the many articles written about him over the decades.  Collier’s Magazine  ran one of my favorite shots in 1947. My Father was 35 years old then, and just opening his lab after the war,” Chatham said. “To me, it conveys his dedication to science, his ability to make all his glassware by hand and always experimenting with chemistry. He was a very serious person in the lab. The sepia effect the photo says ‘history’ to me, and, I hope to the reader.”