All right. #JewelWatch We're going to discuss materials science and jewelry. Or, more to the point, how different metals make different kinds of jewelry possible, due to their strength or softness/malleability.

Due to my own cultural heritage AND knowledge, we'll start --

-- with the earliest known examples and work forward, with a heavy slant toward Euro jewelry because it's me. I know I've got MANY followers who are jewelers, gemologists, engineers, and other related specialties. Join in, correct, add info, as needed.

I'm not an expert at any of this, I'm a nerd who happens to be married to an NDT guy whose uncle is a metallurgist who literally wrote the book on some kinds of metallic pipes and reactor specs.

So. Earliest known setting.

Drill a hole in that sumbitch.

What that is, up there, is the Black Prince's Ruby, which is really a spinel. It can be tracked back to the mid-1300s. You see that pinkish spot on the top? That's a hole. Originally someone drilled a hole in a freaking 170ct/34g rock, so they could hang it by a chain.

Ah. Better picture. The pink bit surrounded by gold? That's an ACTUAL ruby, put there to plug the hole when it was set into THIS bit of jewelry you may know.

...this is gonna take a while because I'm looking stuff up as I go to make sure I'm getting it right.

We'll never have the exact dates correct for when a lot of these settings were invented. Except for the VC&A "Mystery Setting" because they won't shut up about it.

Anyway. See that gold band around the ruby plugging the hole? That's our next setting that we know of, the bezel setting.

Very popular with gold, because gold is soft, so you lay the gemstone in place and smoosh the gold over the edge all 'round to hold it in place.

It's very popular with raw gemstones because you don't have to futz around with the shape too much. Make a hole, put stone in, smoosh, tah dah!

This one goes back to the early days of goldsmithing. You see it in ancient jewelry most often, along with the 'drill a hole'. That is garnets from Sutton Hoo, and agate from the Romans. S American gems were also set this way, still looking for photos.

Cool, forgot the agate, here you go, Roman, c 2200 years ago.

Turned up on a search for ancient Mayan turquoise, if this is truly ancient, it's impressive because they did a bezel set and then threw in a few prongs for safety, which puts them at least a thousand years ahead of Europe.

...I now have ten tabs open and this may take a while.

However the thing to remember about all this is, THE GOLD WAS SOFT AND THE ROCKS WERE HEAVY. That's why they drilled a hole in that giant spinel. There wasn't enough gold to fold over it, to hold that weight in place.

Smaller pieces, note the mosaic bits in the Sutton Hoo piece AND the agate in the roman piece, are not very heavy. So simply folding the soft gold over and counting on it to stay put, was a valid option.

Even a couple hundred years ago, they were bezel-setting anything large to make sure it stayed put.

Behold the Albert Brooch, made 1840ish. Gift from Albert to Victoria upon their marriage.

The diamonds are set like that ancient Mayan piece (and by then it's possible the jewelers stole the idea from the Mayans, now that I think about it). They've got prongs folded over the top of those diamonds, but they're still bezel set to be on the safe side.

The sapphire, if you look closely, the bezel setting is crimped a bit, to hedge their bets; they were getting better about managing the hardness of gold through the addition of other stones, but they were making sure that sucker stayed put.

Which leads to the "Collet setting" which is a bezel with some crimping and a few prongs thrown in for luck.

You hear about 'collet necklaces' in the royal collections of Europe. That setting is what they're named for, and any collet diamond necklace means it's old, and the rocks are enormous. This is the Coronation Necklace from the Royal Collection in the UK.

Better image. It's considered an 'antique' setting. You can see the metal surrounds the stone, because it takes all that soft metal to hold the damn thing still.

Side note here, in the Edwardian era and a few years on either side, they liked to back white diamonds with silver foil, to make them look bright.

Centuries on, the silver has tarnished to hell, and you get this:
(Note most of those are still collet or bezel set.)

So about, what, 1700s, ish, and metallurgy is improved enough that they can rely on the strength of the metals they're working with. First was the half-bezel, no one was getting radical. (Keep in mind, that's modern, the older ones, the 'half' would have wrapped around further.)

Here is one that may be antique or may be some modern jeweler got an old mine-cut diamond, or may have made someone mine-cut a modern diamond... but you get the idea.

Then, again there are NO dates on this stuff and an antiques dealer may be able to give us a guesstimate timeline but I'm not one, THEN, someone said, "what if we do... a row like that? Of squares?" And the Bar Setting was born.

I will tell you, people captioning antique jewelry have no fucking idea what they're talking about.

Right, ignore the center prong-set stone and look at the rectangular baguette, see how there's bars of metal on either end to hold it in? That.

Still looking. I hate when Google gets confused. I've got enough bar pins to cover Queen Mary popping up.

AGAIN ignore the center stone, the three on each side are bar set. (The little balls of metal to add sparkle are called milgrain in modern and antique jewelry and granulated in really old stuff.)

Then in 1886, some yahoo at Tiffany (I can't BELIEVE it was Tiffany) said "what if we just use stronger metal and leave out the bezel?" and the prong setting (I refuse to call it the Tiffany setting) was born. That's the one that's most common now.

Pay attention to the number of prongs. The softer the metal, the heavier the gemstone, the more prongs were needed. That up there is .3ct set in 14ct gold. Light stone, stronger metal.

This one's a bigger diamond, and has eight prongs.

...having things MADE IN MY LIFETIME called antique is really pissing me off.

Okay, calling an intermission to do some research, eat a food, and catch up with my mentions.

Then we go through the umpty-hundred (okay half dozen) variations on prongs before PLATINUM. Game changer.

On the subject of collet diamonds, I should have remembered to bring up Queen Mary, grandmother of QE. She was the only woman ever crowned Empress of India, and she made it count.

That's a Cullinan hanging off the front there, I believe.

When jewel nerds get bored we look at photos of QM and try to figure out the carat weight. That's Cullinans 1, 2, 3, and 4 she's wearing there, before one and two were put in the crown jewels.

Right, so, prong setting. (Tiffany. OMFG.) With better metallurgy, they could control the strength of the metal much better, and before you knew it, someone was "Hey... what if we used the prongs to hold MORE THAN ONE STONE AT THE SAME TIME?

Which led to a bunch of stuff, but it can fall under the cleverly named 'shared prong setting'.

Yay, colored gold. As you can see, it's what it says on the tin. Prongs hold in a stone on either side.

Here's a nice one with color so we can see what's happening, and milgrain to fool the eye with sparkle so you think the black diamonds are reflecting more light than they are.

And then, starting around 1900 for major jewelers, they began working in platinum. Which is harder, stronger, and holds its shape better than gold ever did.

Things went wild. (I'm seeing three settings on that, but I don't have my glasses on.)

And with the extra strength, fewer prongs were needed, and you got more shine.

Only four prongs for the moonstone. The diamonds average three, or four shared on the bottom ring.

And those old bezel settings, someone wondered if they could hold a stone in place by the CORNERS.

They could. And we got the V prong.

By now we're into the early 1900s where if the jewelers weren't doing Art Deco (angular shapes) they were doing Art Nouveau (rounded, swirls, naturalism). And before the stock market crash in '29, people had money to blow on rocks. Jewelers went wild.

The pave setting had already existed, but it was perfected then. True pave is based on a hexagonal grid, the other stuff is shared prong or who knows. But Pave took off.

NOW I find collet settings. See how there are prongs, but there's also a metal collar that comes up to the 'girdle' or widest part of the cut? That's how to tell the difference.

Prong settings, the sides of the gems are open to the light.

Another good collet shot. I swear, you always find the stuff you aren't looking for.

Right. Prong setting. Four prongs, so they've got faith in the metal which is almost definitely platinum.

You're ever shopping estate jewels, the more prongs there are, the more likely it's gold.

So, right. Corner settings. After that was developed, jewelers lost their heads and experimented like mad. One that's still very much in use today is what I think of as the three-pointer. A pear shape with a V prong at the point and one regular prong on either side.

Most places are still nervous and use four prongs and the V, but maniacs like Mr Bhagat last night will go with three.

Cartier (I CANNOT BELIEVE. First Tiffany, now THIS?) was keeping a close eye on the market, and was watching all the art deco shinies walk out the door, and developed the baguette cut specifically for angular deco pieces.

Note if the corners are knocked off, it's an emerald cut. That's because emeralds are so soft, the corners would get knocked off one way or another. And so a legend was born.

And jewelers were setting them in gold and platinum and wherever, because ART DECO, BABIES!

(Platinum bar setting here.)

And now, NOW I find the semi-helpful wikipedia page. Fuck you too, Google, WTF, I look this stuff up all day.

Well, AT SOME POINT AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE, some other nutcase (who better not have been at Tiffany) said "Wait, this metal's hard enough, I have an idea."

And the channel setting, a high-tech version of the half-bezel was invented.

As you can easily see, this took not only the right metal to do this without bending, it also took damn fine precision to keep the stones from falling out. Only low-carat gold can do this; otherwise it bends and bye-bye rocks. It's mostly a platinum thing.

And that's when the fun started.

Because hey, you can do it WITH OTHER GEMSTONES.

Rubies? (Nice color on those.)

Sapphires? (OMG I've got to start cruising estate sales.)

...more sapphires?

OTHER sapphires? This is a 'callibre' cut, where it's shaped channel set.

Or emeralds, there we go.

Mostly it was on to settings that are 'proprietary knowledge' nonsense, but before that in 1933, VanCleef & Arpels invented the "Mystery Setting" which isn't a mystery 'cause they blather CONSTANTLY.

It is pretty slick, in that YOU DON'T SEE THE SETTING.

Unfortunately they use it to make trite, boring, or ugly stuff most of the time, but technically it's pretty interesting. They have an in-house gem cutter to shape the stones properly; sometimes the jeweler and cutter are the same guy. (Radical shift in the industry.)

The last two, I think they have a new art director. Some of their newer stuff is good. The bird brooch is spectacular.

Anyway. Mystery setting. SO MYSTERIOUS.

Wait, look. They DEFINITELY have a new art director.

I'm including the patent diagram for those who find them useful, but from the pic you can see it's a modified channel setting. You kind of secure a row of gems in I believe a friction lock, then slide the row into place.

Back side for reference, as well.

I will add, holy fuck, they changed artistic directors, and that's channel set in platinum. Imagine trying to do that with gold, and that's what this whole thread's been about.

Also pay attention to the different cuts and settings and how they make the design more effective.

There was a stock market crash in there, and then a war, and oh hey, during that war we developed a whole lotta new aerospace metals, didn't we?

The history on titanium is sketchy, but one of the first to use it was James Rosenthal, JAR by fame. 1990s.

The titanium micromosaic was a confluence of the metal being available, Israel and a few other countries getting into computerized gem cutting on itty bitty chips, and someone with enough vision to make it happen.

That seems to be Rosenthal, given available data.

Everyone agrees that SOMETHING is going on that we haven't seen before, but no one's quite sure what. Mention has been made he puts gemstones in through the back of the piece, rather than the front, which would be a big change.

But no one knows WHAT, and he won't tell.

I suspect two layers of titanium, a back and front, that sandwiches the gemstones between them. With CAD and C&C machines, it's possible.

He made his version of the jewel beetle earrings.

THEN - funny how the history of discovery is right in hand with the development of jewelry tech - a wild woman in Canada found a couple-ten (I'm not sure they know how many) kimberlite pipes in Canada near Yellowknife.

And the DeBeers monopoly finally had a chink.

Thanks to that chink, no one is dictating how to cut diamonds any more. I'm still digging for the flat sequins we saw last night, but on the way I found a bunch of others.

The Royal Asscher, which improves on the original Asscher (R) that they developed about 100yrs ago.

Louis Vuitton, who is pushing into the high end market HARD, has patented two new cuts (eye-rollers; think of their trademarks).

Then there's the Jubilee cut, which is either very old (doubt it) or very new (probably) but I can't get data 'cause there's a giant rock of the same name and different cut.

New hexagonal and diamond-shaped cuts, developed by computer (looks like the computer ripped off the Asscher brothers).

I believe an elongated bead cut...

You getting me? This is a flowering of gem-cutting like we haven't seen, ever. And with computer assistance, for maximum sparkle and control. I still haven't found the diamond cuts from last night's thread.

Closest I've got is the old rose cut, which some remind me of - a double-sided rose, but those sequin-cut suckers were flat on both sides.

And then the Chinese got into the game, about the same time as Canada was laughing in DeBeers' face.

Meet the concave millennium cut.

So, to summarize. We're at the edge of another flowering of jewelry creativity, and if we stop trying to blow up the world, will see fantastic works of art for decades to come. There's been more innovation in twenty years, than in two centuries before.

And an old tiara from the 1800s, vs a new tiara from the... 1950s maybe? Gold and platinum, respectively. You understand the difference immediately.

The end.

CLARIFICATION ONE! Milgrain is pressed into the metal with the world’s tiniest pizza cutter while swearing. Granulation is separate little balls fused to the piece with soldering paste and a kiln. Thanks to @yoboseiyo and a friend on a locked acct to be named if they want.

CLARIFICATION TWO! Also from the above friends: collets and bezels are considered the same thing by jewelers. I’m seeing them as different because those prongs are the halfway point between Roman agates and the modern diamond solitare. But jewelers see it from the tech side.

And because we haven't overdone it yet, more, about diamond cuts (that can be applied to other gemstones. https://twitter.com/StrangeAttract5/status/1274863181547143168