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Florida Diamonds
Carat Factory
A Sarasota company can manufacture diamonds as real as those that come out of the ground. Selling them, however, is a multifaceted problem.
 Rock Garden: Hundreds of Gemesis machines grow diamonds at a rate of about half a carat a day. The company plans to market pink diamonds next year and then introduce blue diamonds. [Photo: Mark Wemple] |
Ink quest
Now headquartered in a Lakewood Ranch office park, Gemesis had its genesis nearly 12 years ago. In 1995, former Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke was looking for a new product for his electronic security business, a Clearwater company called Security Tag Systems. The firm produced electronic tags that stores attach to garments to prevent shoplifting, but the tags were clunky and tended to damage fabrics. Clarke envisioned a new anti-theft device — an invisible ink printed onto clothing and merchandise that would trigger an alarm if removed from a store.
Clarke recounts how his ink quest led him to Russia, which in the post-Soviet era had become a flea market for high-tech devices. The invisible ink never materialized, but while Clarke was in Moscow, a Russian contact, Yuri Semanov, asked him if he had any interest in diamonds. “I’m an entrepreneur. I’m interested in almost anything,” Clarke told Semanov.
The next day, Clarke was driven to an explosives factory two hours outside of Moscow, where a burly Russian scientist showed him the blueprints for an apparatus that the man said would make diamonds. Selling price: $57,000. Clarke initially declined the offer but found himself obsessing about it on his long flight back to New York.
Synthetic diamonds were already well-known commodities. General Electric, for instance, had been making synthetic diamonds for drill bits and other machinery since 1964, but those stones were small and fragmented. The Russian invention supposedly could produce a large mono-crystal suitable for jewelry at a very low cost. If the diamond machine worked, Clarke thought, it would create a whole new industry. A few months later, he returned to Russia with a suitcase of cash and an order for two more machines.
While waiting for his machines to be built, Clarke researched the jewelry industry and consulted with several University of Florida researchers who had been working with synthetic diamonds. Dr. Reza Abbaschian, then chairman of UF’s materials science and engineering department and now dean of engineering at the University of California-Riverside, agreed to provide scientific expertise — to verify that the Russian diamond machine really worked. Meanwhile, Clarke worked on financing, rounding up capital from investors to start what became Gemesis in 1996.
