The heat vibrations at 7,000° are so intense that nickel and platinum, the most refractory, the most unmeltable of metals, burn like so much bee's-wax; the best fire-brick used in lining furnaces is consumed by it like lumps of rosin, leaving no trace behind. It works, in short, the most marvellous, the most incredible transformations in the substances of the earth.
Indeed, we have to remember that the earth itself was created in a condition of great heat--first a swirling, burning gas, something like the sun of to-day, gradually cooling, contracting, rounding, until we have our beautiful world, with its perfect balance of gases, liquids, solids, its splendid life. A dying volcano here and there gives faint evidence of the heat which once prevailed over all the earth.
It was in the time of great heat that the most beautiful and wonderful things in the world were wrought. It was fierce heat that made the diamond, the sapphire, and the ruby; it fashioned all of the most beautiful forms of crystals and spars; and it ran the gold and silver of the earth in veins, and tossed up mountains, and made hollows for the seas. It is, in short, the temperature at which worlds were born.
More wonderful, if possible, than the miracles wrought by such heat is the fact that men can now produce it artificially; and not only produce, but confine and direct it, and make it do their daily service. One asks himself, indeed, if this can really be; and it was under the impulse of some such incredulity that I lately made a visit to Niagara Falls, where the hottest furnaces in the world are operated. Here clay is melted in vast quantities to form aluminium, a metal as precious a few years ago as gold. Here lime and carbon, the most infusible of all the elements, are joined by intense heat in the curious new compound, calcium carbide, a bit of which dropped in water decomposes almost explosively, producing the new illuminating gas, acetylene. Here, also, pure phosphorus and the phosphates are made in large quantities; and here is made carborundum--gem-crystals as hard as the diamond and as beautiful as the ruby.
An extensive plant has also been built to produce the heat necessary to make graphite such as is used in your lead-pencils, and for lubricants, stove-blacking, and so on. Graphite has been mined from the earth for thousands of years; it is pure carbon, first cousin to the diamond. Ten years ago the possibility of its manufacture would have been scouted as ridiculous; and yet in these wonderful furnaces, which repeat so nearly the processes of creation, graphite is as easily made as soap. The marvel-workers at Niagara Falls have not yet been able to make diamonds--in quantities. The distinguished French chemist Moissan has produced them in his laboratory furnaces--small ones, it is true, but diamonds; and one day they may be shipped in peck boxes from the great furnaces at Niagara Falls. This is no mere dream; the commercial manufacture of diamonds has already had the serious consideration of level-headed, far-seeing business men, and it may be accounted a distinct probability. What revolution the achievement of it would work in the diamond trade as now constituted and conducted no one can say.