Synthetic Quartz (ex Bell Telephone Laboratories)

Item Description

This a fantastic and honestly impressive Quartz crystal which represents a tremendous combination of scientific achievement and U.S. technological history. This impressive and just plain cool crystal is one of the extremely rare, first-ever-grown synthetic Quartz crystal specimens in the world. Unlike most such pieces, it is actually notably eye-catching and very well-preserved without any damage, and it's completely INTACT, and not sliced up, which is exceedingly rare in my experience. The crystal has tremendous WATER-CLEAR clarity, along with beautifully smooth and contrasting scalloped faces. On each end of the piece you can see small metal seed plates where the crystal was set in place to grow (read below). These specimens are INCREDIBLY hard to find on the market in ANY capacity as they are several decades old! If you collect Quartz, U.S. specimen, pieces of American history or just unique oddities, don't miss out on this fantastic and important large cabinet display specimen. The piece weighs 1,008 grams and was formerly in the collection of Jack Newcomb. It's one of the largest and finest pieces of this material that we've ever had to offer in the auctions.

A brief history of this material: By the 1960s, fine quality Quartz crystals had become an essential part of everyday communications, both civilian and military needs. Precision ground Quartz crystal plates were used in filters, oscillators, and frequency standard circuits in almost all forms of long distance communications. But the high cost and rarity of high quality optic grade Quartz crystals made them a hard commodity to find, most natural crystals contained impurities that made them unsuitable for manufacturing Quartz crystal plates. In 1946, in an attempt to reduce waste and provide a pure source of Quartz crystals, the Bell Telephone Laboratories started experimenting with growing synthetic / artificial Quartz crystals.  A process was developed where a small fragment of Quartz is immersed in an alkaline solution in a tightly closed vessel.   Under immense heat and pressure (which measured over ten tons per square inch and over 700 degrees Fahrenheit!), the Quartz fragment would dissolve.  The liquid would flow by convection to a growing zone where the Quartz would leave the solution and deposit itself on specially designed seed plates. By 1956, the process had been perfected.  Now Western Electric Company and Bell Labs were growing crystals on a large scale.  Very thin cut seed plates were placed into the vessels along with small pieces of natural Quartz and the alkaline solution to grow the synthetic crystals.  The thin line you see on the crystal is the original thin seed plate and the rest of the liquid Quartz crystallized on that thin piece of Quartz. The metallic "bands" on the piece are contacts where the original seed plate was set into place to grow the crystal.