“Diamonds are not brilliant to look at when they are found, and have to be cut and then treated before becoming the sparkling gems that so thrill those who see them. Cutting is a great skill, the centre [center; British] of the industry being Amsterdam in Holland. The cutter has to decide whether to split the diamond or saw it, sawing being done by a revolving bronze disc with an edge which has been treated with olive oil and diamond dust: only diamond dust is hard enough to wear down a diamond.”

Edwin Dahlberg wrote about the splitting of Liberator. “For two months the diamond cutters had been studying the grains and flaws of the largest diamond ever found in Venezuela—the 155-carat [called] Liberator. In the morning of January 13, 1944, Adrian Grasselly, a veteran diamond cutter, fitted his chisel into a groove. He squinted briefly through a jeweler’s glass, and then with one decisive blow rapped the chisel with a short steel bar. A chunk flew from the holder onto the work table. Grasselly picked it up, inspected it, and nodded his head. The Liberator diamond had been successfully divided. A $200,000 investment was safe. Had the plotting been wrong, or had the chisel been struck too hard, the priceless gem would have been shattered into bits.”