Cultured Pearls Change the Course of History
Pearls must have been the first gem that humans marveled at. Before there were tools to cut and polish rubies and diamonds, people all over the world knew of the beautiful gem from the homely oyster, be it freshwater or saltwater.
And a pearls rarity was unbelievable. For each of the thousands of oysters that people opened to eat or to prospect, they would find only one or two pearls. Even rarer was a perfectly spherical pearl; most were baroque shaped, that is, asymmetrical.
So pearls were practically priceless and only for the highest nobility and aristocrats who could afford them. Many called them the queen of gems.
Cultural Revolution
Since about the 700s, there is evidence that the Chinese were able to make some cultured pearls from freshwater oysters. It was not common to be successful, and of course it never became a large industry. But by the turn of the 20th century, several scientists and inventors were trying to perfect the process of making cultured pearls. They knew the key was to insert a small irritant into an oyster to spur it to secrete the substance, called nacre, which makes up a pearl.
Japanese innovators were the first to come up with a reliable surgery to implant the irritant, find the right oyster species, and pick out the ideal watery environment to create cultured pearls. Three men filed patents at almost the same time, only to end up negotiating with each other, and sometimes working together. The man that became the father of cultured pearls was the son of a noodle merchant, Mr. Kokichi Mikimoto.
Mikimoto became a rich, famous businessman after he developed his process for making cultured pearls, but even as Mikimoto got richer, he made pearls available to more and more people. A cultured pearl grows exactly in the same way as a naturally occurring pearl, and even jewelers can only tell the difference with an X-ray. Japanese farms started growing thousands of cultured pearls, and people gladly bought them.
This cultured pearl business drove some countries out of the pearl market. In the 19th century, for example, pearls were Kuwaits biggest export, but when cultured pearls took over the whole pearl market, Kuwait gave up and decided to dig for oil.
Today, many countries produce cultured pearls, from French Tahiti to China, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many others.
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