Quartz became glass after being heated to high temperatures. Before Venice's secret formula was leaked, glass had once been very expensive, a costly luxury.
Carbon could also become diamond after high-temperature heating—or rather, diamond drill bits. "Hope" looked very much like a sapphire, but it was actually a diamond. Though sapphires did not shatter from a single drop like emeralds, they could still break. After all, they did not have the same atomic structure as diamonds.
Australia was "discovered" in 1606, but people did not immediately find its opal deposits. It was not until the 1870s that Australia's opal industry truly began.
Pomona had learned this at the royal jewelry exhibition. Queen Victoria had owned quite a few opal pieces. Opals also had to be graded by quality; because they were not hard enough, they were difficult to cut into faceted gems.
People prized them not because they refracted dazzling fire, but because of the hues, brightness, patterns, and play of color contained within. Arabs believed their radiance came from the cosmos. Ancient greeks believed opals could foresee the future. Shakespeare called them "the queen of gems."
Then, in 1829, a bestselling novel was published. Its author associated opals with misfortune. The heroine possessed an opal that reflected every emotion she felt. When she was angry, it flashed fiery red; when she touched holy water, the opal hanging on her chest instantly "burned pale gray," and she died soon afterward.
For a time, jewelers throughout Europe shunned opals because of that tale. Only Queen Victoria refused to believe such nonsense. She gave each princess a beautiful opal, and they all lived happily, without any mishap—including her second daughter, who married the Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine and became Nicholas II's mother-in-law. Yet she was the first of Queen