Steadiness and nerve, in crystal practice, for things you would rather not walk into. The stone sold at six dollars a carat in the 1880s and fell to cents by the pound inside a decade, and the distance between those numbers is most of the story.
The reading is consistent wherever you meet it. Courage rather than boldness, and the solar plexus centre, which is where this tradition locates will and self-possession. It is what gets recommended to somebody who has to walk into a room and say a thing, and the version of courage on offer is the ordinary kind, the sort that gets you through a Tuesday rather than the sort that storms a bridge.
Tiger’s eye is also one of the few stones on that shelf whose commercial life is written down from beginning to end, in government reports and in the statute book.
Ten years from unknown to every tourist’s stand
Writing the precious stones chapter of the United States Geological Survey’s Mineral Resources of the United States for the calendar year 1887, George Frederick Kunz set down what had happened to it.
“This pleasing stone readily sold for $6 a carat, and at the outset for even more; but owing to the excessive competition of two rival dealers, who sent whole cargoes of it to the London market, the price fell to $1, or even to 25 cents per pound in large quantity.”
Read that twice. A gem priced by the carat, then priced by the pound. Kunz does not say which unit the intermediate dollar belongs to and there is no recovering it, so read the sentence as the fall from the first figure to the last. He gives no source at all for the two rival dealers. That sounds like trade knowledge rather than an audited account, and nothing here rests on it.
Further down the same page, separated from the price sentence by other material, comes his sense of how fast it happened: “Ten years ago this material was practically unknown, but so extensively has it been sold that to-day it is to be found at every tourist’s stand, whether on the Rigi, on Pike’s Peak, in Florida, at Los Angeles, or at Nishni Novgorod.” He calls that the sign of a thoroughly organised distribution system, and he is right on both counts, since a stone at every tourist stand in the world is a stone nobody is paying six dollars a carat for.
The name arrived with the glut
The word came in with the flood, and you can date it from the reference books. James Dwight Dana’s System of Mineralogy of 1868 has the material as entry 249, crocidolite, carrying its earlier names, Klaproth’s Blau-Eisenstein of 1811 and Hausmann’s Krokydolith of 1831. No tiger anywhere in it.
Edwin Streeter’s Precious Stones and Gems went through many editions, and the first, in 1877, has a cat’s eye chapter and mentions Griqualand twice, so the South African diamond region is in the author’s head. Neither tiger’s eye nor crocidolite is anywhere in that edition. By the fourth, in 1884, there is a whole chapter and this sentence: “This African Cat’s Eye, or, as it is sometimes termed Tiger’s Eye, has been brought from Griqualand in masses of sufficient size to be made into snuff boxes, and other ornamental objects.”
Streeter’s own verdict runs to four words. Against what he calls the true Oriental cat’s eye, “this is comparatively worthless.”
Merriam-Webster dates the word tigereye to 1888, and by 1889 the trade had made its peace with the demotion. M. D. Rothschild’s Hand-Book of Precious Stones records that the material “was sold by the carat some years ago, and was largely used in the making of fine jewelry. To-day, this material is so plentiful that it is no longer classed among the higher gems, but serves for cameos and intaglios like chalcedony and onyx.”
South Africa wrote three acts of Parliament about it
Those dates settle something about the reading. The name arrives in print in the 1880s, so anything attached to the name arrives later, which puts the courage reputation on the far side of the collapse rather than in front of it. It grew on a material that was already cheap and already everywhere. Nobody was assigning virtues to a carat-priced gem. They were assigning them to the stone on the tourist stand.
It is also why the next part of the story has no parallel among the stones on a crystal shelf.
The commercial material comes overwhelmingly from the Northern Cape. In 1977 the South African government passed the Tiger’s-Eye Control Act, Act No. 77 of 1977, amended it in 1979 and again in 1981, and all three Acts were repealed together by the Minerals Act of 1991, whose schedule of repealed laws is where their titles still sit in a row.
What the 1977 Act did was ban the export of unprocessed tiger’s eye, to force the cutting and polishing to happen inside South Africa rather than abroad. It did not work. Writing in the Journal of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in 2014, P. F. Ledwaba records that the processing factories closed anyway, for want of infrastructure, skills and access to markets, and that smuggling of unprocessed material followed.
A country legislated three times in four years and kept the law on the books for fourteen, to hold the value of one ornamental stone inside its own borders. It lost. The ban itself outlived the Acts and sits today under a different statute, the International Trade Administration Act of 2002, but the industry it was written to build did not.
What a kilogram of it fetches at the mine
The first number in Ledwaba’s paper is a hole where a number should be. “Production figures were last recorded in 1996 by the Minerals Bureau.” None had been published in the eighteen years to his writing.
What he could gather is what the miners are paid, quoted by the kilogram. Top grade, meaning a seam over 54 millimetres thick, fetched R18.00, and the ladder runs down through the sizes to R6.00 for grade B. At the bottom sits grade X, the material carrying inclusions the trade calls dead stones, at between R0.50 and R1.00 a kilogram. The table carries its own footnote saying the prices are indicative and vary between buyers.
Seam thickness decides part of where a piece lands on that ladder. The rest is chatoyancy, meaning how strongly the band of light rides across the surface, so the quality you look for in a shop is graded at the far end of the chain too, by somebody sorting rough into heaps.
What you paid for
The two ends of that chain look very different from each other. At one end, a kilogram of good rough, priced at eighteen rand and under. At the other, a polished tower on a shelf. The tower on our own shelf is about twelve centimetres, picked out of a table of them at an expo, and it cost sixty dollars. Almost none of that was the stone. It was sawing and grinding and a great deal of polishing, and then shipping, and everyone in the chain taking a margin, and somebody having sorted it into the heap it came from in the first place.
That changes what you are entitled to be fussy about. Nobody is short of tiger’s eye. What separates one polished piece from the next is the work and the selection, and both of those are things you can see standing in front of a table of them. On the piece on our shelf the whole face goes live at once when it turns in low afternoon light, the golden bands shifting across the entire surface. A more typical specimen does something quieter, with the effect confined to one section while the rest of the face stays flat. That difference costs almost nothing at the point of sale, because the difference in the rough behind it was a few rand a kilogram.
The reading is untouched by any of this, and crystal practice never claimed the stone was rare. What to do with it in the few minutes before a door is a separate question, and what the material is, as against what it costs, belongs to the Crystalance Mineral Library. At the mine, a kilogram of the best of it changes hands for eighteen rand.
Sources
- Kunz, G. F., “Precious Stones”, in Mineral Resources of the United States, Calendar Year 1887, United States Geological Survey, p. 575, for the fall from six dollars a carat to twenty-five cents per pound, the two rival dealers and the London cargoes, and for the material having been practically unknown ten years earlier. The figure is legible as $6 on the page scan; the archive’s optical character recognition renders it as $0: archive.org
- Dana, J. D., A System of Mineralogy, 5th edition, New York: John Wiley & Son, 1868, entry 249, for crocidolite’s synonymy including Klaproth 1811 and Hausmann 1831: archive.org
- Streeter, E. W., Precious Stones and Gems, 4th edition, London: George Bell & Sons, 1884, pp. 200 and 246, for the African cat’s eye passage and for “comparatively worthless”: archive.org. The 1877 first edition, which contains no occurrence of tiger’s eye or crocidolite, is at archive.org
- Rothschild, M. D., A Hand-Book of Precious Stones, New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889, p. 8: archive.org
- Merriam-Webster, “tigereye”, for the first known use in 1888: merriam-webster.com
- Republic of South Africa, Minerals Act, 1991 (Act No. 50 of 1991), Government Gazette No. 13253, 22 May 1991, schedule of laws repealed, for the Tiger’s-Eye Control Act, 1977 (Act No. 77 of 1977) and its amendment Acts, No. 48 of 1979 and No. 8 of 1981: gov.za
- Ledwaba, P. F., “Tiger’s eye in the Northern Cape Province, potential for employment creation and poverty alleviation”, Journal of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy 114, November 2014, pp. 881 to 885, for the export ban and the closure of the processing factories, for production figures last recorded in 1996, for the price ladder and its indicative-only footnote, for seam thickness and chatoyancy as the grading criteria, and for the export ban continuing under the International Trade Administration Act of 2002: saimm.co.za
- MIN-004, Crystalance Personal Experience Library: polished tiger’s eye tower, roughly 12 cm, acquired for $60 at a crystal expo and selected from many pieces for the strength of its chatoyancy.
