Workshop “Chemists who burned diamonds” – Florence, 14/11/2025
On Friday, November 14, 2025, at the CNR Research Area in Sesto Fiorentino, in the Toraldo di Francia Room, Building F, from 10:00 a.m. to approximately 12:40 p.m., the free-admission Workshop “Chemists Who Burned Diamonds” will be held. Organized by CNR-ICCOM in collaboration with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze and the Museo Galileo, the workshop focuses on the numerous experiments conducted over two centuries to investigate the nature of diamond. In 1814, at the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History in Florence—now the La Specola Museum—the decisive experiment was conducted by British chemist Humphry Davy and his young assistant and valet Michael Faraday, who was destined to become one of the greatest scientists in history. The two demonstrated that coal and diamond have the same nature, being both composed of the same element: carbon, and only carbon. Using a high-temperature solar furnace, consisting of a burning lens (now housed at the Museo Galileo in Florence), they burned diamonds donated by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand III of Lorraine. The diamonds disappeared without leaving any solid residue, producing only carbon dioxide. The experiment received great resonance in the scientific community of the time and helped establish Florence as a center of European culture. The same burning lens had already been used 120 years earlier by Florentines Giuseppe Averani and Cipriano Targioni, who, on the orders of Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici, subjected diamonds to the lens and observed that they magically disappeared, without burning and without leaving a trace.
During the workshop, the Davy and Faraday experiment will be re-enacted in a modern way.