It's night at the museum.
Inside the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
the last visitor has left.
The dinosaurs are alone.
The north Atlantic right whale has only guards for company.
But on this night, something strange is happening.
The most famous and mysterious diamond in the world
is being taken from its bomb-proof cabinet.
The Hope diamond, at 45.5 carats,
the biggest deep blue diamond ever discovered,
is about to go under the drill to reveal its inner secrets.
Hundreds of millions of atoms will be blasted out of it
and open up a window
into a world over a billion years old.
The Hope diamond
is one of the world's most unique creations.
It's a little bit like a meteorite
that's fallen to the earth from outer space.
The Hope diamond does not just contain
a scientific mystery.
It has also spawned a legendary curse.
It's got this fabulously complicated
and dramatic history.
There are so many twists and turns and dramatic events
and horrible deaths along the way.
Behind the Hope diamond
lies the greatest jewel robbery in history,
a glittering American heiress struck by tragedy
and an executed king and queen.
The idea that here's this diamond
that has touched the neck of Marie Antoinette,
that was stolen from an idol in India
and has this magical power.
For half a century
the Hope diamond has been America's crown jewel.
Now, to mark the anniversary,
master craftsmen at Harry Winston
are creating a new setting selected by the American people.
When you look at the Hope, you are not the same.
This transforms your vision into the world of gems.
This is the astonishing story
of the Hope diamond.
The National Museum of Natural History
in Washington, D.C.
Here, protected by a thick layer of bullet and bomb-proof glass,
lies the most visited exhibit on the planet.
It attracts about as many visitors as the Mona Lisa.
What makes the Hope diamond so special and alluring
is its unique combination
of size, near perfect clarity and deep blue color.
It towers over the single carat diamond
typical of an engagement ring,
but the Hope also contains one mysterious property
that is the subject
of a long running scientific puzzle.
One night in the late 1960s,
scientists in South Africa
placed the Hope diamond under ultraviolet light.
Nothing happened...
Until the light was switched off.
Incredibly, the diamond emitted an almost supernatural red glow.
It continued to glow for up to a minute,
an effect never seen before.
Dr. Jeffrey Post, curator of the national gem collection,
has studied the Hope for two decades.
This glow was something that clued us in to the idea
that there had to be something about this diamond
that made it different than most other diamonds.
We've never seen this intensity in any other diamond.
But what was that something
creating this mysterious red glow?
Some believed the answer could be found in history
or even in legend.
But for the Smithsonian's experts,
it was a question that only science could solve.
The first stage of their investigation
was to go back in time,
to planet earth billions of years ago.
What eventually became the Hope diamond
was first created
around 100 miles below the surface of the earth
in a layer called the upper mantle.
Like every other diamond,
it began life as a cluster of carbon atoms.
Under extreme pressure and heat,
the atoms formed into the rigid crystal structure of diamond.
But to get to the surface,
a diamond has to survive a perilous journey.
The diamond is a passenger.
We've got molten magma that's now pushing, erupting
towards the surface of the earth.
It carries the diamond with it.
Now this eruption is so violent,
it gets to the surface of the earth
in a matter of a few hours.
These diamonds are traveling at 30, 40 miles per hour.
The diamond could have been destroyed during this.
If the diamond traveled too slowly to the surface,
it would change from diamond to graphite.
Again, the diamond would be destroyed.
You know, maybe one in a million,
one in a billion diamonds that are down there
actually make it to the surface.
After the diamond crystal
survived its journey to the surface,
the molten rock cooled and solidified,
entombing the diamond.
Over millions of years, the molten volcanic rock eroded,
releasing the diamond to be washed along rivers
in the sub-continent of India,
finally coming to rest in gravel deposits.
And that was where, in the mid 17th century,
human eyes first gazed upon the largest deep blue diamond
the world has ever seen.
The Hope diamond was about to embark on a 350-year journey.
It would pose a set of riddles
encompassing science, history and a legendary curse.
But it wasn't until the early 20th century.
That the story of a curse first emerged
and captured the public imagination.
At the center of events was a famous American heiress...
Evalyn Walsh Mclean.
1910.
Evalyn and her husband Ned are on vacation in Paris.
They receive a visit
from one of the world's most famous jewelers...
Pierre Cartier...
A man on constant lookout for wealthy customers.
Cartier tells Evalyn an amazing story.
He's recently acquired a diamond
of unparalleled color, size and beauty
and with a history to send shivers up the spine.
The explorer who discovered it, he says,
stole it from the eye of a hindu goddess
in an Indian temple.
He was then ripped apart by wild dogs.
Ever since, there has been a curse
on whoever owned the diamond.
A French queen wore it and was beheaded at the guillotine.
The next owners, one of the richest families in Europe,
were plunged into financial ruin.
But far from scaring Evalyn away,
Pierre Cartier's story
only whets her desire for the diamond.
Evalyn was totally taken by Cartier's story,
I think she was entranced by him.
Cartier stage-managed it so beautifully,
so he was telling the story
and all the time holding in front of him
this package with the diamond in it.
For Cartier, Evalyn is a prime catch.
She agrees to a deal...
She'll buy the Hope diamond for $180,000,
over $4 million in today's money.
But there's one proviso...
If the legendary curse brings anything terrible
within the next six months,
she'll get her money back.
Evalyn reveled in her diamond.
So here's Evalyn at home wearing...
She's wearing a gem around her neck.
And there's the Hope.
She loved the camera.
She'd become her own kind of director.
Evalyn Walsh Mclean's life.
Had been a true rags-to-riches story.
She was born in 1886,
the daughter of a gold miner who struck it rich in Colorado.
At the age of 22, Evalyn married Ned Mclean,
whose family owned banks, a railroad
and the Washington Post newspaper.
Buying the Hope diamond was the most exciting moment yet
in the spectacular life of Evalyn and Ned.
They lived a very opulent life, had everything.
They even built golf holes when Ned became...
Was close to Senator and then President Harding.
She had fountains at the estate, so these were...
This was like being in a massive Hollywood movie in a way.
Evalyn owned many houses.
The largest one still standing is a fabulous mansion
which was once the most expensive property
in Washington, D.C.
Today, It's the home of the Indonesian embassy
and Evalyn's great-grandson, Joseph Gregory,
has come to visit.
When you first walk into the entry hallway of the house,
you see the Tiffany glass
that's in the middle of the entry hallway.
Now, how many people during that time
would have something like that?
Not even the President of the United States
could afford something like that.
Celebrities, politicians,
even the American President, Warren G. Harding,
all flocked to Evalyn's parties,
knowing they were in for an unforgettable night
with the Hope diamond at the center
on a most unusual model.
She had a great dane named Mike,
and Mike would sometimes wear the Hope diamond.
Evalyn never believed that the Hope diamond curse
would strike her.
But nearly 10 years after she first laid eyes on the diamond,
her fairytale life would be shattered.
Death and disaster would strike her family.
It was a series of events that would cement
the idea of a curse in the popular imagination.
Was there something strange or supernatural
about the Hope diamond?
Could it be related to the mysterious red afterglow
that scientists first noticed in the 1960s?
Looks very much like a glowing Ember, for example,
in a barbecue grill at night.
You look at these glowing coals,
and that's really what the diamond reminds me of.
Smithsonian scientists were beginning to think
of a daring experiment
which they Hoped would show the world
that the riddle of the red glow
was a matter of science, not superstition.
But while science would be one tool
to investigate the diamond,
history would be another.
Was there evidence in the Hope diamond's journey
to support the idea of a curse?
What was fact and what was legend?
One thing was certain...
In the mid 17th century,
a French explorer, Jean Baptiste Tavernier,
traveled to an ancient kingdom in India
in search of precious gemstones.
At that time, India was the only place in the world
where diamonds had been discovered.
Historian Omar khalidi
has studied Tavernier's own account of his travels
to a place called golkonda.
It was a time when the kingdom of golkonda
was at the height of its prosperity
and the center of the world gem trade,
and the purpose of Tavernier's journey
was to buy diamonds for the royalty and nobility of France.
Tavernier writes of visiting a temple
containing a large Hindu idol.
"The great idol on the altar"
has two diamonds for his eyes,
and the smallest of these diamonds
"weighs about 40 carats."
Tavernier then relates an extraordinary story
of a local jeweler
who extracted a diamond from one of the idol's eyes
and was horribly punished.
"As he was about to leave in the morning,"
this thief, they say, died at the door
and the idol performed this miracle
"as a punishment of sacrilege."
Many Indians believed that diamonds had inherent qualities
which, depending on their color, could signal danger.
Diamonds had significance beyond wealth.
White diamonds were signs of prosperity;
red diamonds were associated with bravery;
whereas the blue diamonds were associated
with misfortunes, ill omen, bad luck and so forth.
On December 6, 1668,
Tavernier appears at the French court in Versailles
carrying an enormous blue diamond.
There is no record of him revealing
where or how he's obtained it.
Tavernier's client is Europe's most illustrious king...
Louis XIV of France.
For historian Lucy Worsley,
Tavernier's glittering diamonds were the perfect match
for the monarch who called himself "the sun king."
When Louis XIV was here,
this room was full of light through the windows,
from the mirrors, from the candles,
from the silver furniture and also from the king himself
and the diamonds that he might have been wearing.
Louis was the biggest spender of the age.
He single-handedly sparked the world's obsession with diamonds.
Louis XIV really created the market in diamonds.
Up until him, the jewel that everyone had wanted
was the pearl, pearls were the thing,
but suddenly Tavernier arrives from India
with all of these fabulous new stones,
and Louis XIV buys 40 big ones and 1,200 little ones,
has them cut, starts wearing them,
suddenly everyone wants diamonds,
they're the new craze.
Tavernier grows rich from this new European craze,
netting the equivalent of nearly $10 million
for his Indian diamonds,
but the most desirable of all and Louis' favorite
is an enormous 115-carat dark blue.
But Louis is not fully satisfied
with the diamond Tavernier has brought him.
He's willing to cut down a 115-carat diamond
to create something even more dazzling.
The science of cutting diamonds to enhance their brilliance
is still new,
but Louis' court jeweler
will create perhaps the ultimate example.
He grinds and polishes 63 new facets
to create the French blue.
In the process, he shrinks it to 69 carats.
It was really a masterful cutting job of the day.
I mean, you can only imagine how long it must have taken,
how painstaking it must have been
with the tools available at that time,
but what resulted was what was considered at the time by many
to be the world's most beautiful diamond.
For four decades, the French blue is in the emblem
of the order of the golden fleece,
part of the French crown jewels.
But by the end of the 18th century,
time is running out for the decadent French royals.
And for the queen, Marie Antoinette,
diamonds will not turn out to be a girl's best friend.
In July 1789, public anger spills over
into full blown revolution
against Louis XVI and his diamond-loving queen.
Pierre Cartier will later relish telling Evalyn Walsh Mclean.
That Marie Antoinette wore the French blue
around her delicate neck,
a neck that will soon be chopped by the guillotine.
The crown jewels are moved to this building,
the royal warehouse, for safekeeping.
They will not be safe for long.
September 1792.
A gang of professional thieves
commits the greatest heist in history.
The robbers climb up the outside of the royal warehouse.
They break into the jewel room
and take off with a glittering haul.
Amazingly, no one notices the theft
and they return over the next five nights.
By the end, they get away with nearly all the crown jewels,
a priceless collection
that includes the order of the golden fleece
with its dazzling French blue diamond.
It will never be seen again.
So what happened to the French blue?
In 1812, 20 years after the theft
of the French crown jewels,
a mysterious blue diamond appears
in a jeweler's shop in London.
A memorandum authenticates its size and shape.
It compares to the French blue,
but there's one obvious difference.
It's a completely different size.
The French blue is 67 carats,
a little more than 67 carats.
This gem is 44 carats,
and the question is at that time, in 1812,
at the time of this memorandum,
nobody was really asking whether these diamonds were the same,
so this was thought to be just a new diamond.
The new London blue's next destination
has never been proved,
but the finger points to none other
than the future British king, George IV.
It's just so tempting to think that George IV
was the ideal purchaser.
Who else could have afforded it?
Who else would have wanted it?
But what we don't have is any kind of documentation
from the royal archives
or connected with George personally,
saying, "Yeah, I bought the diamond."
In 1830, George IV dies.
Shortly afterwards, the London blue diamond
reappears again in documented historical fact.
It's bought by the man
who will give the diamond its famous name,
a wealthy British banker, Henry Philip Hope.
In 1851 the Hope diamond goes on display
at the great exhibition in London.
It's a sensation.
But a French gem expert now puts forward an extraordinary theory.
He suggests that the Hope diamond
might be a re-cut version of the French blue,
which had disappeared in the French revolution.
The theory would remain unproven until as recently as 2005,
when scientists from the Smithsonian and New Mexico
finally solved the mystery.
Using computer-aided geometry, they modeled both diamonds.
They then created a replica of the French blue
and a mold that precisely fit it.
The next move was to insert the smaller Hope diamond
into the mold and inject it with wax.
They found that the Hope diamond
would fit snugly inside the French blue.
There was only one conclusion.
The Hope diamond that we know today
is in fact the only surviving piece
of the stone that was originally sold
to King Louis XIV of France in 1668.
So did those who possessed the diamond
during this murky period
suffer from a curse?
George IV certainly met an agonizing end.
He died in pain, overweight and suffering from gout.
Fortune would also not smile on the Hope family.
In 1887, 21-year-old Lord Francis Hope
inherits the family estate, art collection
and famous blue diamond.
But he's about to lose it all
thanks partly to an American showgirl
named May Yohe.
He treated her extremely well,
he wanted to impress this American gal.
He actually was part owner of the Lyric theatre in London,
and he arranged for her to get a contract there
and become a leading lady.
He financed, he owned the newspaper,
and he really promoted and marketed her
because he wanted her to shine.
But for Lord Francis Hope,
May Yohe turns out to be a ruinous extravagance.
To maintain her lifestyle,
he gambles away the equivalent of $75 million,
squandering the family fortune.
In 1901, May leaves him
and later makes a Hollywood movie of their life,
blaming their downfall on the curse of the blue diamond.
Lord Francis is forced to sell the Hope diamond.
He dies financially ruined.
For several years, the gemstone crisscrosses the Atlantic,
looking for a buyer,
until finally Pierre Cartier finds Evalyn Walsh Mclean.
In her early years of owning it,
the Hope diamond had brought Evalyn nothing but pleasure.
The curse was just a story.
But then a series of tragedies struck her family
and propelled the curse onto the world stage.
While Evalyn is away at the Kentucky Derby,
her 9-year-old son Vinson is playing near the road
in front of their estate in northwest Washington.
The boy runs out in front of a passing Ford model T.
He's knocked to the ground,
his head smashing into the concrete.
Vinson.
My god, what happened?
A few hours later, Vinson Walsh Mclean dies.
And the family's misfortune becomes headline news.
Get some help, man.
And on the next day in the papers,
in the New York times
and following in other papers around the country,
people speculated was this yet another instance
of the curse of the Hope diamond?
Evalyn Walsh Mclean's dream life.
Is shattered in an instant.
After Vinson's death, the bad luck multiplies.
The Washington Post goes bankrupt
and the Mclean family fortune is decimated.
Evalyn's marriage falls apart.
Her husband Ned ends up in an insane asylum,
and their only daughter commits suicide at the age of 25.
Evalyn always insisted she didn't believe in the legend,
but when she died at 60 after a lifetime of tragedies,
she had become the embodiment of the curse.
Her lavish collection of jewels was put up for sale
with the Hope diamond as the star attraction.
Whether it was science, history or legend,
one thing seemed clear...
The Hope diamond was unlike any other,
and the discovery in the 1960s of its mysterious red glow.
Or phosphorescence, as scientists call it,
only reinforced the mystery.
Why does it show this, this very intense phosphorescence
that seemed to be unusual
and perhaps even unique to the Hope diamond?
To test whether the Hope really is unique,
Jeff Post needs to compare it with other blue diamonds,
but blues are very rare.
Jeff and his colleague Eloise Gaillou
travel to New York City's diamond district
to the one man he knows can help, a dealer...
Alan Bronstein.
We've gotten together about 90 blue diamonds for him,
which have a variety of shades
and have a variety of saturations
and grayness modification,
so that is, that's a large number of blue diamonds
to have in one place to study at one time.
Using a spectrometer to measure the wavelengths of light,
they flood the stones with ultraviolet.
When they turn off the light,
their instrument picks up the phosphorescence.
Ok, so we have a really strong peak
in the blue/green portion of the spectrum,
just the opposite of what we see in the Hope diamond.
We were surprised to see that,
in all of the blue diamonds that we've looked at so far,
and It's approaching 80 blue diamonds,
all of them show a phosphorescence.
All blue diamonds glow,
but the experiment shows
that each has its own distinctive signature.
Some red like the Hope, others blue/green...
And none shines as intensely or for as long as the Hope.
So why do blue diamonds have this eerie phosphorescence?
The fact that we only see
this particular kind of phosphorescence in blue diamonds
strongly suggests that it is correlated
with the presence of boron.
Boron is an element like carbon,
a basic building block of nature found, for example, in soap.
But It's extremely rare deep in the earth
where diamonds are formed.
The Hope diamond glows far more intensely
and longer than any of the smaller diamonds,
so what impact might boron be having inside it?
To find out, Jeff Post will have to take
a sample from the Hope diamond.
The only way to do that seems almost unthinkable.
He will have to drill into America's crown jewel.
His experiment would not be possible
if the diamond were still adorning someone's neck.
But thanks to a surprising donation,
the Hope became a specimen for science.
After Evalyn Walsh Mclean died,
the next owner was the jeweler to the stars, Harry Winston.
Many believe Harry Winston will simply remount the Hope diamond
and find a new buyer,
but he knows it might now be a hard sell.
Think about it this way...
He knew of the curse story.
He knew also that the cost itself,
the price of the stone, went into the millions.
To find a client willing to buy
a quote, unquote "cursed" stone for that amount of money
might have been a huge problem.
Instead, Winston begins to think of an act
of extraordinary philanthropy...
He will donate the Hope diamond to the Smithsonian institution.
But when the news of his intention leaks out,
not everyone is delighted.
A vocal minority is petrified by what might happen to the nation.
One American writes to the Smithsonian...
"With our neighbor Russia"
able to blow our country to pieces
in a few hours of missile bombardment,
it would be insane to tempt fate
"by having anything to do with this ghastly gem."
Actually, people even bypassed the Smithsonian.
They wrote to President Eisenhower
and they said, "are you crazy?"
This Hope dia... This diamond is cursed."
But the Smithsonian doesn't flinch.
They accept the diamond.
You would think Winston would send his priceless diamond
in an armored car.
Instead, what does he do?
What he always did.
He mails it by regular Post.
Today, here came a brown paper wrapped package
sent by registered mail for $152 Postage.
New York diamond merchant...
Winston's unusual delivery method
ensures news coverage throughout the country.
A gift to the Smithsonian worth a million dollars...
The Hope diamond, the biggest blue diamond in the world.
The jewel is put in a specially designed safe
where the public can view it through bullet-proof glass.
With the Hope diamond coming here,
Harry Winston's vision started to unfold...
That is, to build a great national gem collection.
As he liked to say, we don't have a king and queen,
but we should have our crown jewels.
50 years after Harry Winston gave Hope to America,
his company has offered to create
an anniversary party dress for the diamond...
A new, temporary setting
using modern design techniques to showcase its brilliance.
Our rule in this studio
is to start with no limitation.
With no constraint of price, of size, of craziness,
of anything.
What you want to do is enhance the color and the size
and the life of that stone without overpowering.
From 25 initial sketches,
the Smithsonian selects three finalists...
But the final selection is in the hands
of the Hope diamond's true owners.
We really wanted to involve the American audience,
the American public, to have them choose the necklace
that would surround the Hope diamond.
The fate of the Hope diamond,
It's all in your hands.
Hope takes on a new design for a famous jewel.
The public will get to decide
what setting it will have.
Starting today, you can help pick one of those settings.
As the Hope diamond goes on display
for the first time out of its historic setting,
over 100,000 votes flood in.
And the winner is...
Embracing Hope.
Creating such a complex setting
will take a pound of platinum, over 300 baguette diamonds,
and months of painstaking work.
But some might wonder:
By changing the setting, even temporarily,
could they be invoking the legendary curse?
Over the centuries, the diamond has acquired
an unsavory reputation as a producer of bad luck.
Within a year of its donation to the Smithsonian,
the Hope appeared to claim another victim...
The mailman James Todd.
He was injured by a truck,
his wife died and his house burned down.
Over the years, letters have continued to arrive
at the national gem collection
warning of the curse.
But for Jeff Post, all the curse stories
are fantasy or simple coincidence.
For 50 years, the Hope diamond
has brought the Smithsonian nothing but good luck
and fascinating scientific puzzles.
For him the real story is buried far deeper,
in the science of its creation.
In fact, in many ways
the more incredible part of the Hope diamond story
is the one that started perhaps two or three billion years ago
deep in the earth's upper mantle.
It's 7:30 pm
at the National Museum of Natural History.
The last members of the public leave, and all goes quiet.
Tonight, Jeff Post will remove the Hope diamond
and subject it to an audacious experiment.
The goal of doing this work
isn't to try to dispel a curse.
The goal is to learn about the Hope diamond
and its history and its origin.
He and his team are about to do the unthinkable...
Drill into the Hope diamond
to extract atoms and unravel its DNA.
They're using a time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometer.
It's an instrument more often used
to test chemical substances,
for example, for traces of steroids.
They're about to open a window
into a world more than a billion years old,
when the diamond was created.
The instrument fires beams of tiny particles
called gallium ions
onto the surface of the Hope diamond.
The ions blast a crater invisible to the naked eye
from which hundreds of millions of atoms
are sucked back into the machine,
where they're sorted by weight and counted.
It sounds a bit destructive
and in fact it is a little bit of a destructive process.
Blasting is perhaps too strong a word,
but it gives you the idea.
It'll be gouging or blasting a small little tiny crater
into the diamond.
It will sort of drill down through the surface
into the next several layers of atoms,
knocking out some of those atoms,
and we will be making a very tiny little hole
in the Hope diamond.
He Hopes to finally reveal exactly what happened
when the Hope diamond was born.
Two months pass.
Hundreds of millions of atoms
have been extracted and analyzed.
This photo, taken under ultraviolet light,
indicates areas where the samples were taken,
but the holes are far too tiny to see with the naked eye.
The presence of boron is just as Jeff Post anticipated,
but the headline result
is that there's only a tiny amount of it,
and the big surprise is that It's not evenly distributed.
Boron makes the Hope diamond blue,
but its uneven distribution
gives a new insight to that blueness.
The Hope diamond probably isn't uniformly blue.
What we're seeing with the eye
is actually a summation of all of the blue,
different shades of blue in the diamond,
sort of a mosaic of blues in a sense,
and that the blue color varies slightly
with the concentration,
the amounts of boron that are present.
But the most significant outcome
is to show that It's the boron atoms...
Acting with the carbon
and another unidentified atom in the diamond...
That are producing the mysterious red glow.
When an ultraviolet light ray passes through the diamond,
it strikes a carbon atom and spins off an electron,
which gets trapped in the unidentified atom.
At the same time,
a positive charge spins off from the carbon atom
and gets trapped in the boron.
Attracted by the positive charge,
the electron jumps to the boron atom.
It's that collision that causes the burst of red light.
This process happens over and over
in the diamond lattice,
and because some boron atoms
are farther away from the unidentified atoms,
the glow continues for up to a minute.
Science has explained
the Hope diamond's inner secrets,
which leaves only the curse.
Back in 1910, Pierre Cartier had told Evalyn Walsh Mclean.
His amazing story...
The explorer who'd stolen the Hope diamond
from the eye of a hindu goddess
and been ripped apart by wild dogs;
the French queen who'd worn it and lost her head;
the family who'd been ruined.
All struck down by the legendary curse.
America's library of congress houses an extensive collection,
which Richard kurin used to research the Hope's curse.
The more he found out,
the more holes he discovered in Cartier's story.
Tavernier wasn't killed by wild dogs.
He died of old age in Russia.
There was no evidence that Marie antoinette
ever even wore the French blue.
You know, when it was sold to the Mcleans,
the New York times on the front page said,
"this is an ancient curse."
As I started to go through the historical records,
I did not find any mention of any curse of the Hope diamond
before the 1900s.
"Remarkable jewel a hoodoo."
"Hope diamond has brought trouble to all who've owned it."
If the curse was real,
its owners could be expected to have lived short lives,
but did they?
Kurin went back through the records
and investigated all their lifespans.
The average life expectancy of people
that have owned the Hope diamond, direct owners,
is about 72 years old.
That is quite a long lifespan,
considering that we're talking about people, you know,
like Tavernier and kings of France
that lived in the 17th and 18th centuries.
You find that actually people that have owned the Hope diamond
lived extraordinarily long lives,
longer than the average.
There could only be one conclusion...
The curse was an invention,
the brainchild of Pierre Cartier,
who fabricated the tallest of tales
to whet Evalyn Walsh Mclean's appetite for the diamond.
Cartier's brilliant sales pitch had created for the Hope diamond
a legendary mystique that elevated it
into one of the world's most valuable artifacts.
It has survived great journeys, dramatic disappearances
and radical re-designs.
And now, It's about to get another.
Harry Winston is putting the finishing touches
on the Hope diamond's new setting.
In order to create a piece of art
that's wearable,
that actually conforms to the wearer's neck,
is always a challenge.
And what we are doing in this case
is we are actually hinging every single setting.
And in order to create this fluid, very feminine design,
in platinum, with 300 stones and 60 carats of diamonds,
It's a tremendous amount of workmanship that goes into it.
We've actually accomplished a necklace
that would normally take about a year to make
within about 8 months.
So for us it was a bit of a labor of love.
David Schwartz and his team bring the completed setting
to the Natural History museum.
The embracing Hope necklace.
Oh, my gosh. Wow.
That is spectacular.
All we need is a diamond in the center there.
Yeah, that's all we need.
It's ready for the Hope.
It does look like it was made for it, doesn't it?
Exactly.
Now the tricky part.
It's been a hundred years
since the Hope diamond was put in a new setting.
One wrong move could damage the world's most valuable gemstone.
But It's in masterful hands.
Pavel bespalko has been crafting jewelry for over 30 years.
One of his secrets is listening to Chopin
to maintain his concentration.
Winston has brought his work bench from New York
to ensure he has everything he needs.
That's it.
A single screw is all it takes
to hold the set diamond in its ribbons of platinum.
I find the design extremely inspiring.
I just personally love it.
You really see there the two hands
of somebody holding the world, holding the rarest gem on earth.
And it is a symbol of generosity
when you put your two hands like that.
To showcase the new setting,
the museum has tapped a hometown girl:
Estee lauder model hilary rhoda.
I'm actually from Chevy chase, Maryland,
and that's why It's also really nice to come back here
and to the Smithsonian
and shoot this amazing diamond on my neck.
It does feel heavy.
I'm feeling very expensive right now.
My mom and I were walking into the museum today
and she's like, "you know It's cursed, right?"
And I was like, "what? No."
I looked it up, and you know,
apparently It's just an urban myth, right?
I'm hoping?
50th anniversary party dress.
Will be on display for a year
before the diamond returns to its historical setting.
We focus a lot on the history of the Hope diamond.
We're thinking about that
as something that's always happened a long time ago,
which in a sense it has,
except tonight is part of history, too.
And the history of the Hope diamond continues.
And as long as people come to see this diamond
or have an interest in it,
whatever happens to it will become part of that story.
It's fun to in a sense
be a part of this moment in its history
and realize that it is something very special.
Her birthstone is the diamond,
and her monogram is H..R.H.,
her royal highness, which is, I think,
very fitting, very regal.
This stone carries more than 350 years
of the most incredible history,
and that makes the Hope diamond the rarest gem
and the most mythical stone
on earth.