September 15, 2022 • 50 mins
Pearls are super cool. And humans figuring out how to make them is even cooler. Learn all about the most interesting gemstone today!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here kind of
I think she went to go open the door for
a delivery person. Other than that, this is stuff you
(00:22):
should know. Hey, let's hope it's not the land Shark
nine seventies Saturday Night Live fame. That's good stuff. Man. Hey,
you know what I would need to shout out a
listener because this was a genuine listener suggestion. Uh, we
(00:45):
get lots of suggestions and sometimes we take them. Yeah, yeah,
I go, I have one in the pipeline right now.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm I'm just gonna let it be
suspenseful until then. Okay, whose idea I'm trying to think
of which one might be for you, because I know
what's in your pipeline, buddy, Okay, we already did the animals. One.
(01:05):
I can do that scary that scary hole. Uh. This
is Jamie Boo, her nice name, and I didn't even
let Jamie know. So hopefully Jamie, here's this and it'll
just be a big surprise. I know there's a certain
listener out there who is hoping this would be possums.
But here's a little hint. If you suggest something too much,
(01:26):
it becomes a game where we will never do it. Well,
you can ask the guy who um continuously asked for
the Hawaiian Overthrow episode. It's one of those we kind
of did that didn't mean we did do it, And
it's one of those things that you want really bad
and then when you get it you regret over having
asked for it. Yeah, just too much build up, right,
You just gotta let things come as they come, exactly,
(01:48):
chill out, look in your pipeline. I predict that we forgotten.
We normally would have gotten to possums by seven easily.
Never No, never, Right now we ut. But today we're
talking about pearls, right, yeah, pearls and the big thanks
to Jamie boo Her because this is one I'm surprised
(02:08):
we hadn't done. It's very stuff. You should know. He
just sort of sitting out there at the bottom of
the ocean waiting for us to discover it, like a
pearl diver, which weirdly was not even in this article. No,
I thought it was weird too. I did a little
research on it, so we'll we'll hit that in a minute.
But yeah, same. I read that Steinbeck book. What was
(02:29):
it called The Pearl Diver's Daughter. That was the original title,
but he just shortened it and he just said, let's
just call it the Pearl. Okay, I didn't know that
was a Steinbeck book. I knew about Grapes of Wrath
as I lay dying, mainly because that metal band mm
HM travels with Charlie Uhson. Man, what's the canary row? One?
(02:53):
Cannary row of mice and men? Man? Have you ever
seen that? With one? The one with Gary Sinice and
um John Malkovich is Lenny No. I saw the previous
version when I was a kid that I want to
say it was the Quaide the big boy Quade. Oh,
he'd be perfect for that, Randy um And I can't
(03:16):
remember who Lenny was. I think I saw pieces of Oh,
I thought you went of the of the Malkovitch one. Okay,
I thought you meant Randy Quaide was Lenny. I can't
imagine him as anybody else. Maybe Curly, but now I
think Curly is kind of like a Casey sa Moscow
esque smaller dude. You know what I mean. Wait, who
(03:36):
did I say? Did I get it wrong? Who did
I say? Randy Quaide was? You said you couldn't remember
who Lenny was. I don't remember the other guy's name,
but Lenny's the one who was old Yeller at the end, right,
I guess I should say spoiler alert, right of sure,
But if you don't know what that is, just he's
guys and Eddie. That's all you need to know. So Chuck,
let's start talking about pearls at this point. What do
(03:57):
you think? I think let's do it pretty neat, little Jim. Yeah,
you can make a really good argument, and I've seen
it made all over the internet, especially from pearl seller's websites,
that pearls are far and away the oldest gym people
have ever used to adorn themselves with. I don't know
if that's true, but it's possible because you have to
(04:19):
mind gold, you have to stumble upon it. With pearls,
I could see people just you know, diving for seafood
and being like, what is this thing? And oh there's
another one over here, and then all of a sudden
you've got, you know, these gems that are coming out
of the Persian Gulf and being a big deal. Yeah,
and you know it's already weird enough that people correct
an oyster open and said, maybe I should eat that
(04:41):
disgusting looking blob. I know that's kind of an angel question,
is like who ate the first oyster? But uh, when
they saw a little pearl in there? I mean, first
of all, the interior of any We're not any, but
of many mollusk shells can be beautifully iridescent and very
attract of to the eye. So I could see why
(05:02):
somebody might crack a mollusk open and say, hey, that
this looks interesting. Wonder if that piece of meat is
taste good? And it does, especially in a nice buttery
lemon white wine sauce. M hmm. I think we should
do oysters just separately at some point. But I found
a little pearl. Turns out it was a blister pearl,
(05:22):
which means it was we'll get to this, but it
means it's attached to the shell. But I found a
little blister pearl one time, and I can't remember if
it was just dining in a restaurant or whether it
was from a shell when we were like clamming or something,
But I thought pearls only came from oysters, and that
is not true. They can come from just about any mollusk, right,
(05:47):
But you do make a good point. Any mollusk can
make a pearl if you if you're very inclusive of
what forms of pearl because their formed through the same process.
Is the difference between a true pearl and a non
true pearl, if you're going to be a purist, is
the substance that it's made from. And even more mind
boggling than that, they're made from the same substance. It's
(06:07):
just a different structural arrangement of that same substance that
produces a true pearl or a non true pearl. I
think that was enough mystery. Let's let's get in okay.
So one of the things that we need to know
about pearls, and one of the reasons why they've been,
you know, for thousands of years they were like the
great signifier of wealth, is because they're exceedingly rare in nature.
(06:30):
Just kind of globally, you'll find a pearl in about
one and ten thousand mollusks. That's not very many pearls
hanging around out there. So you can imagine that when
a really nice pearl was found. It was you know,
very much treasured um. And every single pearl, no matter
what kind of pearl it is, starts because the little
(06:52):
mollusk that forms the pearl is irritated. That's right. Uh.
You've often heard a grain of sand can turn into
a pearl. That is true. It can be a little
chunk of the shell. Um. Most times it's a little parasite,
and it's almost like an allergic reaction takes place inside
(07:13):
the mollusk and that they mount a defense by coding
this foreign thing that gets in their shell, because you know,
their shell is is ideally sealed up pretty tight, uh,
and they like to keep it nice and clean. Um.
But they something gets in there and they go, all right,
something's in here, shouldn't be. I'm going to coat this
thing with a substance and we'll get to what that
(07:35):
is in a second. And that substance basically just builds
up and eventually it makes a pearl. And you know,
it can be a little blister pearl that's still attached,
or you know, ideally what you're gonna get to is
a perfectly spherical, lovely little thing that could someday end
up on a piece of jewelry. Yeah, now we should
(07:57):
say like that one and ten molas. Like if you
if you get ten thousand mollisks together on the beach,
you would find a pearl in one of them. Um,
it would be even rarer than that to find a
perfectly spherical or even close to spherical pearl, Like those
are really really rare in nature, right, Um. But that
(08:18):
stuff that makes that pearl, depending on what kind of
mollusk it comes from, if it's a true pearl, the
stuff that they build up to kind of isolate that
grain of sand or that parasite or whatever, is called
naker and naker is this combination of um, a kind
of calcium carbonate called aragonite, and then another substance kind
(08:38):
of like an organic binder called concleolin. And as different
layers are put down at a little bit of water,
slowly by but surely like the layer kind of gets
bigger and bigger and bigger, and a pearl forms around that. Again,
you have to remember this, this thing that we prize
and value and think is one of the most beautiful
things in the world, is a Pearl's Like you said,
(09:00):
an allergic reaction to an irritant. That's what it's doing.
It just so happens that we find them gorgeous and
like to wear them on our foreheads. Forehead, it's a
great place for a pearl. How did you pronounce that
second word, naker or oh con con conchiolian? Yeah, thrown
that ellen there. It's very easy to want to do.
(09:23):
Can I get the earth? Yeah? Conkylin uh and naker
by the way, spelled in a c R E for
those of you who love it when I just randomly
spell things, um and naker. You know, I talked about
that beautiful iridescence. Um, it's it's mother of pearl. That
is Naker. So when you look at the inside of
a of a mollusk, of a shellfish that has that
wonderful sort of rainbow iridescent look, that is the Naker
(09:47):
and it's really super strong. Um. And I believe it
they've been you know, it's it's part of the structural
integrity of keeping the mollusks strong, right right, Yeah, It's
like that's um, what what we would consider like what
our bones are made out of. That's what the mollusk's
hardness is made out of. I think, Yeah, exactly, at
least the interior part. So then there's the other non
(10:08):
true pearls. They're called non nacreous pearl because they're not
made with nacre They're made with a calcareous concretion, which
again is made from calcium carbonate crystals, but it's a
different arrangement of calcium carbonate called calcite, and calcite is
more stable than aragonite, but it's more fragile, and it's
(10:29):
just not the same thing as a pearl. Yeah, these
are the non acreous are I'm sometimes pink or brown. Uh,
And they generally come from the Queen conk. We say conk, right,
and we say conch conk. That's what I always said.
But I also heard people say conch one time, and
I thought it was mispronouncing they were they were dead wrong, okay, uh.
(10:52):
And this conk mollusk, the queen conk is in the
Caribbean or is it Caribbean because I heard someone say
it's the Caribbean. Yeah. You have to say it like
you're about to sing the Billy Ocean song. Yeah, queen, Yeah,
but you have to just leave everybody hanging you. Well,
you've never noticed in that song he goes Caribbean queen
(11:15):
conk in the background. Uh. I do want to recommend
this story that we're not going to get into here,
but Olivia, who helped us with this, was kind enough
to tease us with a story from one about a
Tai fisherman who found a mellow pearl m e l
o and that's um one of the other kinds of
(11:36):
non ne creus uh mollusk pearls, and it was worth
about three grand. These things are really really rare. They're uh,
you can't make them in nature, so that's why they're rare,
and we get to or you can't make them, you know,
by human hands, I should say. Uh. So they're super
rare and they're very um fragile. Uh and as a result,
(11:59):
they're really expensive. But is there's a really good story
about this Thai fisherman who found one worth a lot
of money and just go look it up on the
internet and read about it. But it's it's pretty involved. So,
like you said, the non acreous pearls are made by
the mellow mellow sea snail or the queen conk mollusk,
but the true pearls are typically made by saltwater oysters.
Or freshwater mussels. Like when you're thinking of a pearl, pearl,
(12:23):
it probably came from a mussel, possibly from Ohio or Tennessee,
of all places, the Tennessee River. That was one of
the most mind blowing things I've ever heard. Or if
it's saltwater oysters, it might be on the northern coast
of South America. It might be on the in the Baja,
the Gulf of California, off the Baja in Mexico. Um,
(12:44):
those are some really good spots for it, too. Or
it could also be in places in Japan as we'll
see too. Yeah, and the Tennessee River and a couple
of these other places are some of the some of
the only places where people still dive for pearls, because again,
as you'll see, most pearls that we see today are
made by people, Uh well, people and mollusks, sure in conjunction. Yeah, um,
(13:10):
but you know, we can talk just for a little
bit about pearl diving. That was how they used to
find pearls. And if you think, well, I get oysters,
you know, I live in I live near the ocean,
and I get oysters just in my oyster trap a
few feet down those are almost certainly not going to
be making pearls. The pearl bearing mollusks are generally very
very very deep, and these divers it was kind of
(13:33):
the I don't know if it was the reason people
started free diving so deep, but people who were really
good at free diving so deep, uh, often became pearl
divers in you know, free diving, or the people that
eventually they would get a mask, but they would you know,
you just go down there with your lungs and swim
super super super deep. And that's what the Steinbeck novel
(13:54):
is about. So so, like I saw that a pearl
diver might dive down to any feet undred and fifty feet. Yeah,
that's like fifty meters if you're paying attention, Um, that
is extremely deep. That's actually beyond like the recreational scuba
divers limits. I think that's like ninety hundred feet. So
(14:14):
these people are free diving that deep, and yeah, they're
having to hold their breath for many, many minutes, but
they're pretty good at it. And the reason why I
think they have to dive so low and the reason
why you're not going to find a pearl in an
oyster along them, the shoreline is because the flow of
water has to be below a certain speed or else
(14:34):
the nakers just not going to form correctly or at all,
from what I can tell, So they're gonna be just
sitting real still. Yeah, exactly, for sure. Should we take
a break. Sure, we'll take a break, and we'll come
back and talk a little history, because it turns out
people have like pearls for a really long time. So Chuck,
(15:12):
we're back and we're talking pearl history and um. From
what I could tell, for about four thousand years, the
vast majority of pearls came from around the Persian Gulf,
the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Mannar by Sri Lanka.
And that was just the way it was. If you
had a pearl before about the nineteen twenties or thirties,
(15:33):
it was very likely that it came from one of
those areas. And in about the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Yeah,
and they were, like you said, they were always prized. Um. Obviously,
if you look at a pearl, um, it's a anytime
something really that beautiful comes from nature, that's that rare um.
It becomes a precious item. And from the very beginning
in I mean you name it. In most ancient places
(15:58):
where you could get pearls, they were written about. They
were prized and warned by the nobility. Maybe nobility definitely
kings and queens, maybe sometimes only kings and queens, and
not even like lower nobility. They were that rare, but
they also kind of hoarded them, like their stories of
(16:18):
you know, uh, ancient queens having like hundreds and hundreds
of pearls. Uh, It's not like they just had like, oh,
we found one and the rest, you know, other people
can wear. Yeah. I think the oldest pearl necklace that
was found is come comes from about twenty four hundred
years ago or twenty three hundred years ago in a
place that was called Susa, which we now recognizes Iran,
(16:39):
And it was in a princess's sarcophagus, and it was
a pearl necklace of two hundred and sixteen pearlstears. It
is a lot of pearls, especially considering again like just
any normal pearl is found in one in ten thousand mollusks,
and this this princess had two hundred and sixteen pearls,
So she would have been what you would call fabulously
wealthy at the time. Uh. Uh. Native American cultures prized
(17:02):
the pearl as well as you'll see. If you can
find them in the Tennessee River, Uh, then you can.
There are other places in the Midwest of the United
States where you can find pearls still today. So they
love them and use them. I think Mother of Pearl
has always been used. The ancient Egyptians definitely used it
as far as BC, even though they got pearls much later. Yeah,
(17:27):
apparently it wasn't until they were conquered by the Persian
Empire about the sixth yes, sixth century BC um that
they finally got pearls, which does not make sense to me,
but you know them's the Brakes history. Uh. This cleopatri
story is pretty interesting. I think we talked about this
in our Cleopatric episode. I'm pretty sure it sounds awfully familiar.
(17:49):
It did. As the legend goes, she bet Mark Antony
that she could present the most expensive dinner ever made,
and he was like, all right, let's see what got
I think there's a catch. And there was a catch
because supposedly pearl earrings were crushed into powder and dissolved
into wine, and she went game on. She famously went
(18:15):
and then down her pearl shot of vinegar. Yeah, and
supposedly he said, no, thank you, No, that's too opulent
from waw. Yeah, I can't. I don't know if that
would be bad for you or probably just benign. Well,
it depends, because there's a lot of cultures over the years,
as we'll see, that have basically prized pearls for all
sorts of medicinal values along the way, Like everybody from
(18:38):
the Hindus to the Daoists to um ancient Sanskrit medical
texts like the Chakara Samhita all basically said, hey, pearls
are really good for everything from prolonging youth to curing
weak eyes. It's an elixir to restore strength. Like I
think anytime there's something that's valuable as a thing of beauty,
(18:59):
they also just assume that it has some sort of
healthful properties as well, And pearls are definitely in that
in that um realm. I'm curious if there's anything to
any of that, if there's been like modern studies on
pearl dust. Well, I know they put pearl dust in
some skin creams too, and it supposedly adds a youthful
glow to your skin. But that's smax to me of
(19:21):
basically the same thing as Sanskrit medical texts saying it
restores strength and youthfulness. And you know that because you
use it right, maybe it's still worth a try. Um.
Once the Crusades got going in the medieval era, they
started trading with Asia, all these pearls were coming to
(19:43):
Europe and again, and once they made their way to Europe,
they were basically off limits. They're actually sumptuary laws that
said you can't have them, common people, you can't have
anything nice. That's what all these laws are about. Yeah,
supposedly it was to to really keep the class delineations
in a order, but also it's supposedly to prevent the
lower classes from engaging in in wanton spending that they
(20:07):
couldn't afford, you know, in a like a form of vice,
like luxury. Basically, Um, the thing is that we have
credit cards right right, It's the opposite of a sumptuary law. Um.
The thing is, apparently Scotland has really nice pearls. And
I saw in more than one place that the story
goes that Caesar actually invaded Britain because he was after
(20:30):
um Uk pearls at the time, although it was in
the UK. You know what I'm saying. We still get
those emails all the time. For sure, we could, like
if you put a gun to our head, we could
come up with it. But just sometimes on the fly
it's hard to remember. Well. And sometimes when we say
English or England, we're talking about England. I think the
official right, right, but yeah, exactly, but I think the
(20:51):
official thing is the United Kingdom of Great Britain in
northern Ireland. I think I can hear some people in
Europe clamping right now. Uh well, speaking of them, uh,
the colonizers. Of course, once they started making their way
around the world and plundering everything, they obviously took wherever
there were pearls, they would take and harvest those pearls
(21:14):
and send them back to Europe again, whether it was
Panama or Mexico or places in South America. Wherever they
went and they had pearls, they were for the right,
for the taken, and again they went back to the courts. Generally,
um men wore pearl ear rings. Apparently in Henry's court,
um Elizabeth had thousands and thousands of pearls that were
(21:37):
you know, hey, a pearl button looks much nicer than
a real button or just a pearl adornment, and so
let's just use those instead of regular buttons. Yeah. One
thing that I found mind blowing was that um that
her gowns would have thousands of pearls sewn into them,
and that when you clean the gown you had to
you had to take all the pearls off and then
(21:59):
clean it and then sew all the pearls back onto.
Can you imagine you know what? I bet if you
told that story back then and Elizabeth was in the room,
she would say, really, they do that right, probably, And
by the way, off with your head right for telling
me that story. I don't like guilt man. That was
(22:20):
a great Elizabeth the first impression. Thank you, so onward
and upward, Chuck. Because in the late late nineteenth century,
and in particular, a guy named guest Tom Vives became
the first human being, as far as we know, to
set up a genuine, large scale commercial oyster farming operation
(22:43):
with the express purpose of producing as many pearls as possible.
Pretty good idea in eighteen it is. And because the
the you know, the the um what's the word, I'm
looking for where something happens and like in ratio for
warm um the how about okay, I know where you're going.
(23:06):
How about this, Because pearls are so rare, Vives said,
I'm going to overcome this by just having gobs and
gobs and gobs of oysters. Um, so that just I'll
beat the odds. And in fact, he beat the odds
big time because he was farming oysters and harvesting anywhere
between four to fourteen pearls per one hundred oysters. So
(23:28):
he was having a four to fourteen percent yield of
of pearls. Pretty good, right, well, I mean way better
than what we said to begin with, which is one
in ten, right, which is so he was harvesting up
to fourteen percent of pearls, or harvesting pearls from fourteen
percent of his oysters. The worldwide estimate would be harvesting
pearls from point zero zero zero one percent of oysters
(23:50):
that you would find. Yeah, and I don't think we
said this is in Mexico, And of course these are
reports that this happened in fourteen percent is the very
highest end. It was four to fourteen. But that's even
let's say it's four percent. That's still a lot more.
And the only thing that people can reckon is that
it was just a place where, uh, they had a
(24:14):
lot more pearls, because that can happen. Yeah, the conditions
must have just been just perfect right there in the
Gulf of Mexico. Um. That yeah, so good for guests,
tom vvs. But one really important thing to remember about
Vivez's operation is he was farming them naturally. Again, he
was overcoming the odds just by sheer numbers of oysters
he was raising. But he also figured out some really
(24:35):
important stuff too that the better you take care of
your oysters, the more you protect them from predators, the
more you protect them from disease, the more you scrub
them free of barnacles several times a year, the likelier
they are to produce a really nice pearl. Uh. And
so he established some techniques that I believe are still
kind of foundational in pearl culturing today. But he did
(24:57):
not try to artificially implant or or get um I guess,
jump start pearl creation in oysters. He was just letting
it happen naturally. So he wasn't technically culturing pearls. He
was just farming oysters for their pearls. Yeah, cultivating, right,
I'd say culturing. No, I mean he would have been cultivating,
(25:19):
oh sure, sure, grooming, breeding, um raising, Uh, beating the odds. Uh.
If you want to talk about making pearls, culturing pearls,
of course, you got to look to ancient China. They're
the first people that kind of started doing that. They
put little molds. This is very cool. They put little
molds that had different things, but chiefly little Buddha images
(25:44):
into muscles freshwater muscles around five CE, and they would
develop those blister pearls that I talked about that I
found one time that are attached to the interior of
the shell, and it would be in about the same shape.
It's not like it produced a perfect little Buddha blister pearl,
but looked enough like it to where it was, you know,
(26:05):
a pretty ingenious thing. Um, they were not, they were
you know, I think the blister pearls are called like
half pearls or hemispherical. They're not obviously prized and the
kind that you want to put on a necklace. But
it kind of got the ball rolling as far as uh,
knowing that we can culture pearls. They would say it
(26:25):
either looks like Buddha or Abraham Lincoln guaranteed. So a
long time after that, UM, people started like really trying
to figure out how to intensively cultivate pearls or culture pearls.
I'm confused, but UM. There was a guy named WILLIAMS.
Seville Kent who was English, believe it or not, and
he was a marine biologist working in Australia. UM, and
(26:48):
he said, you know, I really think this guest on
Vivez guy is is onto something. UM, but I think
he's he's missing the point. He's just kind of letting
nature take its course, beating the odds, you could say. UM.
And instead, Seville Kent wanted to kind of like hasten
nature to kind of like increase his chances even further
(27:09):
by trying to figure out how to make pearls happen unnaturally,
I guess. And he never got any further than creating
blister pearls, which from what I can tell, is the
easiest pearl you could possibly make. And he died eight
and it just he just never cracked that code. But
shortly after that, in another part of the world, in Japan,
(27:30):
there were some guys who've been working on this independently,
and they did crack that quote. Finally they did. And
we should mention the reason that they wanted to speed
up the pearl nous of the world was not only
just to obviously make more money if they could control
something like that, but in Australia and in Japan, uh,
they were, um, these moments were overfished at the time,
(27:52):
which meant obviously they were under pearled, and so they
kind of had like there was a need created for
pearls that wasn't being met. So all of a sudden
they started saying, hey, we can If we can make
a blister pearl, maybe we can carry this over and
make regular real pearls. And in Japan there's the akoya
oyster okoya oyster sorrd to say fast and abalone, which
(28:16):
is like a big, very expensive kind of seafood. It's
a sea snail and huh it is, yeah, yeah, what
do you think it was? I thought it was more
clam like than snail like that. Well, it's called a
sea snail, but it looks like a clam. Okay, that's
one of those things sort of like never mind, I'm gonna.
(28:38):
I want to know, you have to text it to me.
Oh that's okay, Well, yeah, I'll text it to you.
Um So, these two things, the Akoya oyster and the
abalone uh in Japan and the waters around Japan had
very um nice natural pearls being produced again under pearl
because of overfishing. And in eighteen eight he ate there
(29:00):
was an oyster farmer who figures very highly in the
story name Uh. And this gets a little confusing because
a lot of names are similar, but his name was
Kokichi Miki Moto, and he started working with a professor
name Kochi Ki is that right? Kakichi Kaikichi uh Mitsukuri Uh.
(29:21):
And he was from Tokyo Imperial University, and they started
working together trying to get a technique going for initially
growing these blistered pearls. And they were successful in that
not only could they get that going, but they could
actually industrialize it and make it like a really ramp
up the process and get a lot of them going. Yeah.
Mickey Moto's aim for for starting to cultivate pearls was
(29:43):
because he wanted to democratize pearls. He wanted anybody at
the time to be able to wear a pearl necklace.
And that's why he was, you know, he said about
trying to figure this out. And again, like you said,
the best they could come up with blister pearls, and
they call them half pearls for a reason because you
have to break them off of the shell, that inner shell,
and so you've ruined one side of it, whereas a
true pearl um will form inside the oyster and can
(30:07):
just be kind of plucked out rather easily, and it's
it's a whole it's a whole pearl that's not attached
to the shell. So it seems like if you could
make a blister pearl, you could make a true pearl,
and it just was not that easy. UM and neither
Mickey Moto nor Mitsukuri ever figured it out. Really, it
was actually a student of Mitsukuries, a guy named Tokichi Nishikawa,
(30:30):
who UM actually came up with the the way to
create a genuine pearl through cultivation practices, and the same
process is essentially UM used today. Yeah, it's basically what
they did was they said, hey, let's take what nature does,
and that's like what we have to sit around and
(30:51):
wait every ten thousand molesks to see happen, and let's
let's just do it ourselves. Let's figure out a way
to speed it up and do it by hand. And
they did. They would cut out that you know we
talked about the naker. They would cut out the part
of the oyster, which is the mantle that secretes that naker.
They would artificially put in a little bit of shell. Uh.
(31:12):
Instead of like a grain of sand, they would use.
I think they found that a little like round cutting
of that iridescent shell works best, right. I think they
found that muscle shells work best for some reason. But yeah,
they would make them round or spherical, right, and then
they would put that back into another oyster. I think
of the same variety. I don't think they mix and matched.
(31:35):
And that would basically cause that process to start. They
would say something's in me that shouldn't be in me,
and it would create a little pearl sack has that
little seed in the middle, and it started just coating
it with that substance. Yeah, And so they would surgically
implant shell pieces and like a piece of mantle from
another oyster, which is kind of mangola esque if you
(31:57):
think about it. And they would use little, tiny modified
dental tools to create this surgery um and it was
really hard to do because you can't open an oyster
shell more than two to three centimeters, which is not much,
or else it's it's either going to kill them the oyster,
or it's going to upset it so much that it's
going to reject this this implanted nucleus the seed for
(32:20):
the pearl. So it's really hard to do. And again
this is still the way that they do this, and
it turns out, strangely, there was an entirely other guy
UH named um Tatsuey miss A who was a carpenter
and he was working on his own version of the
exact same thing, apparently independently at the same time in Japan,
(32:41):
and he Uh and Nishikawa went to go patent their methods,
found that the other one had applied for a patent
for the exact same thing, and came to an agreement,
which I think is really sweet because had it been
like Thomas Edison or somebody, that would have been like
legal battles and murders of elephants and all that stuff.
These guys just came to an agreement to call this
process the Nishikawa method. Right. Uh, some people say that, um,
(33:06):
we talked about Seville Kent, who died without having perfected
the non blistered process. Uh. Some accounts do say that
both of these people, which is, you know, basically how
they were working independently on the same process, got their
process from notes from Seville Kent. But I don't think
that's been like proven out, so who knows, It's just
(33:26):
part of the lore. Well yea at this point. I mean, Plus,
the Ville Kent never cracked the blister, the blister pearl barrier. Yeah,
he'll he'll b BP yeah or b P B B
b B blister yeah, the BP B. So Mickey Moto,
who just as a refresher was that original oyster farmer,
(33:49):
was a really good promoter, really good marketer. UM had
a pretty good operation going. In fact, they still the
company is still around today and they still make pearl
jew reach. But they would build these big pearl structures
at displays that expo shows. And he would go around
and talk to like governments and say, hey, this jewelry
(34:10):
is like I know, we're making them by hand, but
it's still like a real pearl, Like look at these
things and sort of had to overcome the uh, these
aren't true pearls argument, Yeah, the diamonique challenge. Yeah, but
you did overcome it. The thing is is they're just
not as valuable, not because they're not real pearls. They
(34:30):
are real pearls that are made from the same stuff
and everything. It's just that humans have intervened and taken
happenstance out of the out of the process. Right. The
reason that they're not as expensive is because there's so
many of them. You can produce them so much more easily.
And so Mickey Moto actually did what he set out
to accomplish, democratized pearls. And now you can get a
(34:50):
strand of pearl like a pearl necklace for like a
hundred bucks if you want. And they're beautiful, gorgeous pearls
that if somebody came up and said which one is
the natural pearl and which one is the cultivated pearl? Uh,
you would not be able to tell no, not at all. Uh.
They were brought over to America and at a really
bad time, just before the Great Depression in nine eight,
(35:14):
but they hung around and then after the Great Depression,
um people started buying pearls and pearl necklaces. And another
thing that happened was they started making just straight up
imitation pearls and these look great too. And Jackie Kennedy's
very famous pearl necklace was not real. It was a
gift from her mother. Uh, they were artificial pearls. I
(35:37):
think a lot of times the pearl necklaces that you
see um can be artificial. And uh they sell like
hotcakes too. Yeah. I looked it up. I could not
find for certain what Jackie Kennedy's um pearls were made of.
But the closest I saw was a guess at glass
that they were made of glass. Everybody, you know, there's
been apparently all kinds of things glass alabaster, and then
(36:00):
they would put everything from egg white to fish scales
to snail slimeh to create that. You know, pearl has
a certain look. It's not just like a plastic wind
looks plastic for a reason, but a good artificial pearl
has a little magic to it as well. Do we
take a break? I think so, all right, we'll take
our last break and we'll come back and finish up
(36:21):
with what's going on today in the world of pearls.
(36:45):
All right. Uh, we're in modern times now and things
are still about the same about the pearls, like genuine
pearls that you're going to get our cultured Uh it is.
If you'd say I want a pearl necklace and I
wanted to be the pearls found from that are natural pearls,
then you got a lot of money laying around and
(37:05):
you're pretty picky. Uh yeah, yeah, that's yeah. But you
can thank Mickeymoto for not having to have to have
a lot of money laying around or to be particularly picky. Um.
And there's a bunch of types of cultured pearls. Uh.
There's a koya, south Sea, Tahitian and fresh water and
depending on the type of mollusk that's used, it's going
(37:26):
to produce different colored gems. Basically, because I don't know
if we said are not. A pearl is considered a
gem even though it's not um like a mineral in
the sense that like a diamond is, but it's still
it still has a crystalline structure, so I guess it's
considered a gem. Plus people just like to wear them
on their foreheads. As I said, But if you want
a black pearl you're gonna have to go down to
(37:47):
Tahiti and get one from the black lip oyster, which
is just a yeah, they're cool, and they're not necessarily
all black. They can be gray, they can be browned,
they can be black, but they'll also they'll also have
like kind of iridescent hints of like greens or purples,
even pink. I saw oh pink pearls, well, pink black pearls,
which is uh if you if you're talking about just
(38:11):
sort of the standard traditional classic pearl. Uh. They are
produced in Japan and China, and those are those original
cultured a koya pearls still to this day. Um. And
then I guess you know the fresh water pearls. Those
are the ones that come from the Tennessee River, among
other places. Uh, fresh water mussels produced them. They are
(38:32):
um not as expensive. They come in all kinds of
shapes and sizes from lakes and ponds and I guess
rivers if it's the Tennessee River. And uh, they're also
little things called like rice pearls that look like what
you would think look like little grains of rice. Um.
They tried to perfect the process of getting them less
rice like over the years and found that if they
(38:54):
just switched the species of muscle, then they could do
that and it worked. Yes, And here is a little
tipped for you. If you want to impress everyone at
the country club, you obviously belong to. UM. Next time
you see somebody wearing pearls that are not spherical, tell
them you love their baroque pearls, because a baroque pearl
is anything but around shaped pearl. Yeah. If you look
(39:17):
up baroque pearl necklace, it looks almost like a necklace
of molars. Yeah, weirdly they do. Um, And that's a
that's a natural looking pearl. Again, a perfectly spherical, even
close to perfectly spherical pearl is really rare in nature. Um.
And so more often than not, you're going to see
(39:37):
everything from like blobby misshapen ones that, like you said,
look like molars, ones that are like teardrop shape. There's
a bunch of different cool shapes that that you know,
it can be produced as natural pearls, and all of
those are broke right. UM. It is still kind of
a rare thing to cultivate successfully, or to culture successfully, UM,
(39:59):
a pearl old they've gotten the process down pretty good.
But uh, it takes about ten to eighteen months, and
about half of the oysters even survive that nucleation process,
like you were talking about, because it's really just very
very precise and it is very finicky. Uh. And of
those half, only about five percent will end up producing
a high quality pearl. So when you're pearl uh culturing,
(40:24):
I was about to say farming, I guess it's farming
in a way. Um, you are making most of your
profit about from those that five percent of the fifty
percent end up becoming high quality pearls. And you can
still do some stuff with a non high quality, but
you're not going to get the big top dollar prices.
And again that's just from cultured pearls. Again, it just
(40:46):
kind of reminds you how how really rare the really
nice natural ones are. And you said that it takes
ten to eighteen months. I saw in some cases they'll
they'll give the pearl up to four years to develop.
And while they're while they're cultivating or cult during the
the oysters, the pearls in the oysters, um, they will
scrub the oysters three times a year protect them from
(41:08):
predators and disease. These are like the most well cared
for oysters, which is great, but again they've had some
other foreign objects surgically implanted in them, and then when
the pearl is taken out, I don't believe the oyster
typically survives that process, which, if you really stop and
think about it, is is pretty mean. It's actually a
(41:28):
really mean, tortuous process. They're cared for while they're being raised,
it's true, but they're killed to get the pearl out
of them. They're just basically a machine to produce a pearl.
Is how the pearl industry views oysters or other mollusks
that that produce pearls for it, well, hopefully they become
dinner and then nope, part of someone's driveway. They definitely
(41:49):
do not. They don't need really know and one of
the I think what Gaston Vivez actually might have come
up with this technique if it's not older, but I
think it's still in Useton places build harvest the oysters
when it's pearl harvesting time, and just to make the
process easier, they'll dump the oysters into huge piles. Cover
the piles so that things can't get to them, like
(42:09):
predators or like vultures or whatever. Um, and let the
oysters rot, and then the pearls are just easier to
retrieve after the fleshy part of the oysters gone. Truly,
some of those dudes are eating oysters. Some of them are.
And if you how about this, chuck, I've got a little,
a little fact for you that's going to keep you
off the oysters forever. Um, you you don't. If you're
(42:31):
eating a raw oyster, you're not dead oyster. Everyone does that.
It's really I didn't realize that really. Yeah, No, I'd
never really thought about it. But there's there's they're probably dead,
but if they're dead, they're freshly dead, and they're so
freshly dead it's possible that they're not actually dead yet.
So you might be eating them live when you eat
them raw. I hadn't thought about that. It makes me sad. Yeah,
(42:52):
I think they once you, I mean you've shucked oysters before, really, no,
I might have my oysters for me. Well. Part of
the shucking process involves cutting it loose from its shell
where it's attached, and I think that's that's that lifeline. Um, yeah,
I mean, hey, it's just it's a renewable resource. But uh,
(43:14):
Peter obviously is going to say, now, making pearls is
not something people do just because you're you're messing with
an animal to get something from it. Yeah, so pet
is of course going to be against us. Sure, and
there is like a moral question about it is morally questionable,
but there are some real upsides to it. One is
it gives another industry to um to areas that might
(43:35):
be subject to over fishing, so that they don't have
to over fish just to make money. They can raise
oysters as well for pearls. Um. The oysters definitely clean
the water in the area that they filter out all
sorts of impurities and problems. UM. So that actually does
make the water cleaner and um as long as they're
not messing with like the coral reefs or the local
(43:57):
ecosystems to to create these farms, and they're doing it
in a more sustainable manner, it actually is a fairly
sustainable industry. It's just again mean to the oysters or
other mollusks. Are you off oysters now? I don't know.
You'll have to ask me when somebody presents me with
a platter of them and some crackers and and uh,
mignon Net, Mignonett. You gotta order that stuff? Uh, you
(44:21):
just randomly get presented with platters of oysters? What kind
of life you live in at the country club when
I wear my string of molar pearls? Uh? Should we
go over kind of quickly a couple of these um
expensive famous pearls. Yeah, definitely, so you know, if you
want to talk about super expensive, super huge pearls, Uh,
(44:41):
there are a handful that. Um, you know, sometimes they
look like super large molar Sometimes they look like Olivia
described one as looking like a giant white brain. Um,
they're they're not very good looking. Um, yet they can
be really expensive, just as prized collectibles. I think. Um,
it's not like I don't think they've discovered a process
(45:02):
where they can take a big, large brain looking oyster
and break it down into a pearl and break it
down into like five thousand perfect little pearls, right, No,
not that I know of. No, it's more just like
they prize it for its weirdness and rarity. Yeah, yeah,
there's one. I think the biggest one we could find
is the seventy five pound pearl of Puerto And the
thing is, whenever one of these comes out. Everybody's like,
(45:24):
that's so expensive, it's so valuable. That one was valued
at a hundred million dollars and it was found by
a fisherman who kept it under his bed for a
decade in the Philippines. Now, all of a sudden, he's
sitting on a hundred million dollar pearl um or I
should say, sleeping over one um. But it's never been sold,
so no one knows if it actually is worth that.
It's worth whatever somebody will pay for it, basically exactly.
(45:47):
It's a very good point. But there is one called
La Peregrina, and it is arguably the most famous pearl
in the world. Is an egg shaped pearl. It's been
um fashioned into different necklaces and different jewelry. It's appeared
in poor tricks of queens, including I believe Elizabeth the
First and then a bunch of Spanish queens over the
years because it was part of the Spanish Crown jewels.
(46:09):
And then it finally made its way into a necklace
that Richard Burton bought for Elizabeth Taylor in nine very
famously so in that need, imagine wearing a piece of
jewelry that you knew was in a portrait of a
queen that was made hundreds several hundred years ago, and
now you're wearing it too, Like that's just cool. That's
one thing I like about stuff like this, Like a
pearl is something that can you know, make its way
(46:31):
through time and history from from person to person. Yeah,
and part of Hollywood history. I mean, one of the
great offen on romances in Hollywood history. Some people would
prize it just for that, from Richard Burton to Elizabeth
Taylor's neck. And uh, I think we should also mention
at least the people like, come on, I don't care
about giant Mueller's brain looking things. Guys, what is the
(46:56):
biggest like pearl pearl, Like the biggest really round owned
natural looking pearl. Uh? And I think the biggest one
they found is about and it's pretty big if you
think about a near spherical pearl um about point seven
inches right, um, and that's big. It's thirty three carrots.
If you know anything about diamonds of thirties, imagine a
(47:17):
thirty three caret diamond, but a pearl instead. And I
think it's sold for a million dollars in two thousand fourteen,
appropriately enough a million buckaroos. Uh, yeah, you've got anything else?
I got nothing else. All right, well, Chuck's got nothing else.
I've got nothing else. And since I just said that
out loud, that means it's time for listener mail. Uh.
(47:39):
And I'm gonna call this do do, which is usually
your trumpet. Powell would like, yeah, please do do do do. Oh.
You went an octave higher. Yeah, very impressive. The stuff
you should know five k is all set and ready
for another year. If you're listening, you don't know what
this is. The stuff you should know Army on the
(48:00):
Facebook page, they get together, they plan out a five
k race uh slash walk and it's just a very
fun community event that happens all over the world. I
think it's not like they all meet together in Kansas
that Aaron Cooper's house and run from his driveway to
the nearest grocery store, which is at least five k Uh.
(48:22):
They do this at the same time in the spirit
of all being together. And the dates are October twenty
one to October one, so it's a rolling race, Uh
it is. They took a vote online and the title
of the race this year is the s y five
(48:42):
k is ready are you in commemoration of the tenure
anniversary of the camera ad that ran. It's probably still
running for all I know. It definitely is on some
episode somewhere. Um there is an event page if you
want to find out more. They're getting all the details
worked out still, but I wanted to drop this early.
Just go to this Stuff you Should Know Army facebook page,
(49:04):
do a little search for the five K. They probably
have something pinned. Uh. There is someone named the listener
named Sarah Denny what Moore who is suggested a costume element.
If people are into that and they're working out the
prizes and things, and uh, it's all going. So if
you're into community and exercise and being a part of
something cool, go check it out. Uh. And this, of
(49:26):
course was an update from Aaron Mizzell. Aaron Mizell, Aaron,
I don't know which way I've said it in the past,
but I'm saying Mozzelle, Mozzelle. It's probably just Mozzell. Aaron's great,
She's been around forever. She was a movie crush or
two and that was still a thing. Yeah, and she's
a long time member of the Stuff You Should Not Army,
And maybe even the chair of the Stuff you Should
Know five K I'm not sure. She's definitely up there. Um.
(49:50):
And if you want to be like Aaron and let
us know something awesome happening, we want to hear about it.
You can send it to us in an email to
stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot m H. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(50:15):
H
Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. Jerry's here kind of
I think she went to go open the door for
a delivery person. Other than that, this is stuff you
(00:22):
should know. Hey, let's hope it's not the land Shark
nine seventies Saturday Night Live fame. That's good stuff. Man. Hey,
you know what I would need to shout out a
listener because this was a genuine listener suggestion. Uh, we
(00:45):
get lots of suggestions and sometimes we take them. Yeah, yeah,
I go, I have one in the pipeline right now.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm I'm just gonna let it be
suspenseful until then. Okay, whose idea I'm trying to think
of which one might be for you, because I know
what's in your pipeline, buddy, Okay, we already did the animals. One.
(01:05):
I can do that scary that scary hole. Uh. This
is Jamie Boo, her nice name, and I didn't even
let Jamie know. So hopefully Jamie, here's this and it'll
just be a big surprise. I know there's a certain
listener out there who is hoping this would be possums.
But here's a little hint. If you suggest something too much,
(01:26):
it becomes a game where we will never do it. Well,
you can ask the guy who um continuously asked for
the Hawaiian Overthrow episode. It's one of those we kind
of did that didn't mean we did do it, And
it's one of those things that you want really bad
and then when you get it you regret over having
asked for it. Yeah, just too much build up, right,
You just gotta let things come as they come, exactly,
(01:48):
chill out, look in your pipeline. I predict that we forgotten.
We normally would have gotten to possums by seven easily.
Never No, never, Right now we ut. But today we're
talking about pearls, right, yeah, pearls and the big thanks
to Jamie boo Her because this is one I'm surprised
(02:08):
we hadn't done. It's very stuff. You should know. He
just sort of sitting out there at the bottom of
the ocean waiting for us to discover it, like a
pearl diver, which weirdly was not even in this article. No,
I thought it was weird too. I did a little
research on it, so we'll we'll hit that in a minute.
But yeah, same. I read that Steinbeck book. What was
(02:29):
it called The Pearl Diver's Daughter. That was the original title,
but he just shortened it and he just said, let's
just call it the Pearl. Okay, I didn't know that
was a Steinbeck book. I knew about Grapes of Wrath
as I lay dying, mainly because that metal band mm
HM travels with Charlie Uhson. Man, what's the canary row? One?
(02:53):
Cannary row of mice and men? Man? Have you ever
seen that? With one? The one with Gary Sinice and
um John Malkovich is Lenny No. I saw the previous
version when I was a kid that I want to
say it was the Quaide the big boy Quade. Oh,
he'd be perfect for that, Randy um And I can't
(03:16):
remember who Lenny was. I think I saw pieces of Oh,
I thought you went of the of the Malkovitch one. Okay,
I thought you meant Randy Quaide was Lenny. I can't
imagine him as anybody else. Maybe Curly, but now I
think Curly is kind of like a Casey sa Moscow
esque smaller dude. You know what I mean. Wait, who
(03:36):
did I say? Did I get it wrong? Who did
I say? Randy Quaide was? You said you couldn't remember
who Lenny was. I don't remember the other guy's name,
but Lenny's the one who was old Yeller at the end, right,
I guess I should say spoiler alert, right of sure,
But if you don't know what that is, just he's
guys and Eddie. That's all you need to know. So Chuck,
let's start talking about pearls at this point. What do
(03:57):
you think? I think let's do it pretty neat, little Jim. Yeah,
you can make a really good argument, and I've seen
it made all over the internet, especially from pearl seller's websites,
that pearls are far and away the oldest gym people
have ever used to adorn themselves with. I don't know
if that's true, but it's possible because you have to
(04:19):
mind gold, you have to stumble upon it. With pearls,
I could see people just you know, diving for seafood
and being like, what is this thing? And oh there's
another one over here, and then all of a sudden
you've got, you know, these gems that are coming out
of the Persian Gulf and being a big deal. Yeah,
and you know it's already weird enough that people correct
an oyster open and said, maybe I should eat that
(04:41):
disgusting looking blob. I know that's kind of an angel question,
is like who ate the first oyster? But uh, when
they saw a little pearl in there? I mean, first
of all, the interior of any We're not any, but
of many mollusk shells can be beautifully iridescent and very
attract of to the eye. So I could see why
(05:02):
somebody might crack a mollusk open and say, hey, that
this looks interesting. Wonder if that piece of meat is
taste good? And it does, especially in a nice buttery
lemon white wine sauce. M hmm. I think we should
do oysters just separately at some point. But I found
a little pearl. Turns out it was a blister pearl,
(05:22):
which means it was we'll get to this, but it
means it's attached to the shell. But I found a
little blister pearl one time, and I can't remember if
it was just dining in a restaurant or whether it
was from a shell when we were like clamming or something,
But I thought pearls only came from oysters, and that
is not true. They can come from just about any mollusk, right,
(05:47):
But you do make a good point. Any mollusk can
make a pearl if you if you're very inclusive of
what forms of pearl because their formed through the same process.
Is the difference between a true pearl and a non
true pearl, if you're going to be a purist, is
the substance that it's made from. And even more mind
boggling than that, they're made from the same substance. It's
(06:07):
just a different structural arrangement of that same substance that
produces a true pearl or a non true pearl. I
think that was enough mystery. Let's let's get in okay.
So one of the things that we need to know
about pearls, and one of the reasons why they've been,
you know, for thousands of years they were like the
great signifier of wealth, is because they're exceedingly rare in nature.
(06:30):
Just kind of globally, you'll find a pearl in about
one and ten thousand mollusks. That's not very many pearls
hanging around out there. So you can imagine that when
a really nice pearl was found. It was you know,
very much treasured um. And every single pearl, no matter
what kind of pearl it is, starts because the little
(06:52):
mollusk that forms the pearl is irritated. That's right. Uh.
You've often heard a grain of sand can turn into
a pearl. That is true. It can be a little
chunk of the shell. Um. Most times it's a little parasite,
and it's almost like an allergic reaction takes place inside
(07:13):
the mollusk and that they mount a defense by coding
this foreign thing that gets in their shell, because you know,
their shell is is ideally sealed up pretty tight, uh,
and they like to keep it nice and clean. Um.
But they something gets in there and they go, all right,
something's in here, shouldn't be. I'm going to coat this
thing with a substance and we'll get to what that
(07:35):
is in a second. And that substance basically just builds
up and eventually it makes a pearl. And you know,
it can be a little blister pearl that's still attached,
or you know, ideally what you're gonna get to is
a perfectly spherical, lovely little thing that could someday end
up on a piece of jewelry. Yeah, now we should
(07:57):
say like that one and ten molas. Like if you
if you get ten thousand mollisks together on the beach,
you would find a pearl in one of them. Um,
it would be even rarer than that to find a
perfectly spherical or even close to spherical pearl, Like those
are really really rare in nature, right, Um. But that
(08:18):
stuff that makes that pearl, depending on what kind of
mollusk it comes from, if it's a true pearl, the
stuff that they build up to kind of isolate that
grain of sand or that parasite or whatever, is called
naker and naker is this combination of um, a kind
of calcium carbonate called aragonite, and then another substance kind
(08:38):
of like an organic binder called concleolin. And as different
layers are put down at a little bit of water,
slowly by but surely like the layer kind of gets
bigger and bigger and bigger, and a pearl forms around that. Again,
you have to remember this, this thing that we prize
and value and think is one of the most beautiful
things in the world, is a Pearl's Like you said,
(09:00):
an allergic reaction to an irritant. That's what it's doing.
It just so happens that we find them gorgeous and
like to wear them on our foreheads. Forehead, it's a
great place for a pearl. How did you pronounce that
second word, naker or oh con con conchiolian? Yeah, thrown
that ellen there. It's very easy to want to do.
(09:23):
Can I get the earth? Yeah? Conkylin uh and naker
by the way, spelled in a c R E for
those of you who love it when I just randomly
spell things, um and naker. You know, I talked about
that beautiful iridescence. Um, it's it's mother of pearl. That
is Naker. So when you look at the inside of
a of a mollusk, of a shellfish that has that
wonderful sort of rainbow iridescent look, that is the Naker
(09:47):
and it's really super strong. Um. And I believe it
they've been you know, it's it's part of the structural
integrity of keeping the mollusks strong, right right, Yeah, It's
like that's um, what what we would consider like what
our bones are made out of. That's what the mollusk's
hardness is made out of. I think, Yeah, exactly, at
least the interior part. So then there's the other non
(10:08):
true pearls. They're called non nacreous pearl because they're not
made with nacre They're made with a calcareous concretion, which
again is made from calcium carbonate crystals, but it's a
different arrangement of calcium carbonate called calcite, and calcite is
more stable than aragonite, but it's more fragile, and it's
(10:29):
just not the same thing as a pearl. Yeah, these
are the non acreous are I'm sometimes pink or brown. Uh,
And they generally come from the Queen conk. We say conk, right,
and we say conch conk. That's what I always said.
But I also heard people say conch one time, and
I thought it was mispronouncing they were they were dead wrong, okay, uh.
(10:52):
And this conk mollusk, the queen conk is in the
Caribbean or is it Caribbean because I heard someone say
it's the Caribbean. Yeah. You have to say it like
you're about to sing the Billy Ocean song. Yeah, queen, Yeah,
but you have to just leave everybody hanging you. Well,
you've never noticed in that song he goes Caribbean queen
(11:15):
conk in the background. Uh. I do want to recommend
this story that we're not going to get into here,
but Olivia, who helped us with this, was kind enough
to tease us with a story from one about a
Tai fisherman who found a mellow pearl m e l
o and that's um one of the other kinds of
(11:36):
non ne creus uh mollusk pearls, and it was worth
about three grand. These things are really really rare. They're uh,
you can't make them in nature, so that's why they're rare,
and we get to or you can't make them, you know,
by human hands, I should say. Uh. So they're super
rare and they're very um fragile. Uh and as a result,
(11:59):
they're really expensive. But is there's a really good story
about this Thai fisherman who found one worth a lot
of money and just go look it up on the
internet and read about it. But it's it's pretty involved. So,
like you said, the non acreous pearls are made by
the mellow mellow sea snail or the queen conk mollusk,
but the true pearls are typically made by saltwater oysters.
Or freshwater mussels. Like when you're thinking of a pearl, pearl,
(12:23):
it probably came from a mussel, possibly from Ohio or Tennessee,
of all places, the Tennessee River. That was one of
the most mind blowing things I've ever heard. Or if
it's saltwater oysters, it might be on the northern coast
of South America. It might be on the in the Baja,
the Gulf of California, off the Baja in Mexico. Um,
(12:44):
those are some really good spots for it, too. Or
it could also be in places in Japan as we'll
see too. Yeah, and the Tennessee River and a couple
of these other places are some of the some of
the only places where people still dive for pearls, because again,
as you'll see, most pearls that we see today are
made by people, Uh well, people and mollusks, sure in conjunction. Yeah, um,
(13:10):
but you know, we can talk just for a little
bit about pearl diving. That was how they used to
find pearls. And if you think, well, I get oysters,
you know, I live in I live near the ocean,
and I get oysters just in my oyster trap a
few feet down those are almost certainly not going to
be making pearls. The pearl bearing mollusks are generally very
very very deep, and these divers it was kind of
(13:33):
the I don't know if it was the reason people
started free diving so deep, but people who were really
good at free diving so deep, uh, often became pearl
divers in you know, free diving, or the people that
eventually they would get a mask, but they would you know,
you just go down there with your lungs and swim
super super super deep. And that's what the Steinbeck novel
(13:54):
is about. So so, like I saw that a pearl
diver might dive down to any feet undred and fifty feet. Yeah,
that's like fifty meters if you're paying attention, Um, that
is extremely deep. That's actually beyond like the recreational scuba
divers limits. I think that's like ninety hundred feet. So
(14:14):
these people are free diving that deep, and yeah, they're
having to hold their breath for many, many minutes, but
they're pretty good at it. And the reason why I
think they have to dive so low and the reason
why you're not going to find a pearl in an
oyster along them, the shoreline is because the flow of
water has to be below a certain speed or else
(14:34):
the nakers just not going to form correctly or at all,
from what I can tell, So they're gonna be just
sitting real still. Yeah, exactly, for sure. Should we take
a break. Sure, we'll take a break, and we'll come
back and talk a little history, because it turns out
people have like pearls for a really long time. So Chuck,
(15:12):
we're back and we're talking pearl history and um. From
what I could tell, for about four thousand years, the
vast majority of pearls came from around the Persian Gulf,
the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Mannar by Sri Lanka.
And that was just the way it was. If you
had a pearl before about the nineteen twenties or thirties,
(15:33):
it was very likely that it came from one of
those areas. And in about the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Yeah,
and they were, like you said, they were always prized. Um. Obviously,
if you look at a pearl, um, it's a anytime
something really that beautiful comes from nature, that's that rare um.
It becomes a precious item. And from the very beginning
in I mean you name it. In most ancient places
(15:58):
where you could get pearls, they were written about. They
were prized and warned by the nobility. Maybe nobility definitely
kings and queens, maybe sometimes only kings and queens, and
not even like lower nobility. They were that rare, but
they also kind of hoarded them, like their stories of
(16:18):
you know, uh, ancient queens having like hundreds and hundreds
of pearls. Uh, It's not like they just had like, oh,
we found one and the rest, you know, other people
can wear. Yeah. I think the oldest pearl necklace that
was found is come comes from about twenty four hundred
years ago or twenty three hundred years ago in a
place that was called Susa, which we now recognizes Iran,
(16:39):
And it was in a princess's sarcophagus, and it was
a pearl necklace of two hundred and sixteen pearlstears. It
is a lot of pearls, especially considering again like just
any normal pearl is found in one in ten thousand mollusks,
and this this princess had two hundred and sixteen pearls,
So she would have been what you would call fabulously
wealthy at the time. Uh. Uh. Native American cultures prized
(17:02):
the pearl as well as you'll see. If you can
find them in the Tennessee River, Uh, then you can.
There are other places in the Midwest of the United
States where you can find pearls still today. So they
love them and use them. I think Mother of Pearl
has always been used. The ancient Egyptians definitely used it
as far as BC, even though they got pearls much later. Yeah,
(17:27):
apparently it wasn't until they were conquered by the Persian
Empire about the sixth yes, sixth century BC um that
they finally got pearls, which does not make sense to me,
but you know them's the Brakes history. Uh. This cleopatri
story is pretty interesting. I think we talked about this
in our Cleopatric episode. I'm pretty sure it sounds awfully familiar.
(17:49):
It did. As the legend goes, she bet Mark Antony
that she could present the most expensive dinner ever made,
and he was like, all right, let's see what got
I think there's a catch. And there was a catch
because supposedly pearl earrings were crushed into powder and dissolved
into wine, and she went game on. She famously went
(18:15):
and then down her pearl shot of vinegar. Yeah, and
supposedly he said, no, thank you, No, that's too opulent
from waw. Yeah, I can't. I don't know if that
would be bad for you or probably just benign. Well,
it depends, because there's a lot of cultures over the years,
as we'll see, that have basically prized pearls for all
sorts of medicinal values along the way, Like everybody from
(18:38):
the Hindus to the Daoists to um ancient Sanskrit medical
texts like the Chakara Samhita all basically said, hey, pearls
are really good for everything from prolonging youth to curing
weak eyes. It's an elixir to restore strength. Like I
think anytime there's something that's valuable as a thing of beauty,
(18:59):
they also just assume that it has some sort of
healthful properties as well, And pearls are definitely in that
in that um realm. I'm curious if there's anything to
any of that, if there's been like modern studies on
pearl dust. Well, I know they put pearl dust in
some skin creams too, and it supposedly adds a youthful
glow to your skin. But that's smax to me of
(19:21):
basically the same thing as Sanskrit medical texts saying it
restores strength and youthfulness. And you know that because you
use it right, maybe it's still worth a try. Um.
Once the Crusades got going in the medieval era, they
started trading with Asia, all these pearls were coming to
(19:43):
Europe and again, and once they made their way to Europe,
they were basically off limits. They're actually sumptuary laws that
said you can't have them, common people, you can't have
anything nice. That's what all these laws are about. Yeah,
supposedly it was to to really keep the class delineations
in a order, but also it's supposedly to prevent the
lower classes from engaging in in wanton spending that they
(20:07):
couldn't afford, you know, in a like a form of vice,
like luxury. Basically, Um, the thing is that we have
credit cards right right, It's the opposite of a sumptuary law. Um.
The thing is, apparently Scotland has really nice pearls. And
I saw in more than one place that the story
goes that Caesar actually invaded Britain because he was after
(20:30):
um Uk pearls at the time, although it was in
the UK. You know what I'm saying. We still get
those emails all the time. For sure, we could, like
if you put a gun to our head, we could
come up with it. But just sometimes on the fly
it's hard to remember. Well. And sometimes when we say
English or England, we're talking about England. I think the
official right, right, but yeah, exactly, but I think the
(20:51):
official thing is the United Kingdom of Great Britain in
northern Ireland. I think I can hear some people in
Europe clamping right now. Uh well, speaking of them, uh,
the colonizers. Of course, once they started making their way
around the world and plundering everything, they obviously took wherever
there were pearls, they would take and harvest those pearls
(21:14):
and send them back to Europe again, whether it was
Panama or Mexico or places in South America. Wherever they
went and they had pearls, they were for the right,
for the taken, and again they went back to the courts. Generally,
um men wore pearl ear rings. Apparently in Henry's court,
um Elizabeth had thousands and thousands of pearls that were
(21:37):
you know, hey, a pearl button looks much nicer than
a real button or just a pearl adornment, and so
let's just use those instead of regular buttons. Yeah. One
thing that I found mind blowing was that um that
her gowns would have thousands of pearls sewn into them,
and that when you clean the gown you had to
you had to take all the pearls off and then
(21:59):
clean it and then sew all the pearls back onto.
Can you imagine you know what? I bet if you
told that story back then and Elizabeth was in the room,
she would say, really, they do that right, probably, And
by the way, off with your head right for telling
me that story. I don't like guilt man. That was
(22:20):
a great Elizabeth the first impression. Thank you, so onward
and upward, Chuck. Because in the late late nineteenth century,
and in particular, a guy named guest Tom Vives became
the first human being, as far as we know, to
set up a genuine, large scale commercial oyster farming operation
(22:43):
with the express purpose of producing as many pearls as possible.
Pretty good idea in eighteen it is. And because the
the you know, the the um what's the word, I'm
looking for where something happens and like in ratio for
warm um the how about okay, I know where you're going.
(23:06):
How about this, Because pearls are so rare, Vives said,
I'm going to overcome this by just having gobs and
gobs and gobs of oysters. Um, so that just I'll
beat the odds. And in fact, he beat the odds
big time because he was farming oysters and harvesting anywhere
between four to fourteen pearls per one hundred oysters. So
(23:28):
he was having a four to fourteen percent yield of
of pearls. Pretty good, right, well, I mean way better
than what we said to begin with, which is one
in ten, right, which is so he was harvesting up
to fourteen percent of pearls, or harvesting pearls from fourteen
percent of his oysters. The worldwide estimate would be harvesting
pearls from point zero zero zero one percent of oysters
(23:50):
that you would find. Yeah, and I don't think we
said this is in Mexico, And of course these are
reports that this happened in fourteen percent is the very
highest end. It was four to fourteen. But that's even
let's say it's four percent. That's still a lot more.
And the only thing that people can reckon is that
it was just a place where, uh, they had a
(24:14):
lot more pearls, because that can happen. Yeah, the conditions
must have just been just perfect right there in the
Gulf of Mexico. Um. That yeah, so good for guests,
tom vvs. But one really important thing to remember about
Vivez's operation is he was farming them naturally. Again, he
was overcoming the odds just by sheer numbers of oysters
he was raising. But he also figured out some really
(24:35):
important stuff too that the better you take care of
your oysters, the more you protect them from predators, the
more you protect them from disease, the more you scrub
them free of barnacles several times a year, the likelier
they are to produce a really nice pearl. Uh. And
so he established some techniques that I believe are still
kind of foundational in pearl culturing today. But he did
(24:57):
not try to artificially implant or or get um I guess,
jump start pearl creation in oysters. He was just letting
it happen naturally. So he wasn't technically culturing pearls. He
was just farming oysters for their pearls. Yeah, cultivating, right,
I'd say culturing. No, I mean he would have been cultivating,
(25:19):
oh sure, sure, grooming, breeding, um raising, Uh, beating the odds. Uh.
If you want to talk about making pearls, culturing pearls,
of course, you got to look to ancient China. They're
the first people that kind of started doing that. They
put little molds. This is very cool. They put little
molds that had different things, but chiefly little Buddha images
(25:44):
into muscles freshwater muscles around five CE, and they would
develop those blister pearls that I talked about that I
found one time that are attached to the interior of
the shell, and it would be in about the same shape.
It's not like it produced a perfect little Buddha blister pearl,
but looked enough like it to where it was, you know,
(26:05):
a pretty ingenious thing. Um, they were not, they were
you know, I think the blister pearls are called like
half pearls or hemispherical. They're not obviously prized and the
kind that you want to put on a necklace. But
it kind of got the ball rolling as far as uh,
knowing that we can culture pearls. They would say it
(26:25):
either looks like Buddha or Abraham Lincoln guaranteed. So a
long time after that, UM, people started like really trying
to figure out how to intensively cultivate pearls or culture pearls.
I'm confused, but UM. There was a guy named WILLIAMS.
Seville Kent who was English, believe it or not, and
he was a marine biologist working in Australia. UM, and
(26:48):
he said, you know, I really think this guest on
Vivez guy is is onto something. UM, but I think
he's he's missing the point. He's just kind of letting
nature take its course, beating the odds, you could say. UM.
And instead, Seville Kent wanted to kind of like hasten
nature to kind of like increase his chances even further
(27:09):
by trying to figure out how to make pearls happen unnaturally,
I guess. And he never got any further than creating
blister pearls, which from what I can tell, is the
easiest pearl you could possibly make. And he died eight
and it just he just never cracked that code. But
shortly after that, in another part of the world, in Japan,
(27:30):
there were some guys who've been working on this independently,
and they did crack that quote. Finally they did. And
we should mention the reason that they wanted to speed
up the pearl nous of the world was not only
just to obviously make more money if they could control
something like that, but in Australia and in Japan, uh,
they were, um, these moments were overfished at the time,
(27:52):
which meant obviously they were under pearled, and so they
kind of had like there was a need created for
pearls that wasn't being met. So all of a sudden
they started saying, hey, we can If we can make
a blister pearl, maybe we can carry this over and
make regular real pearls. And in Japan there's the akoya
oyster okoya oyster sorrd to say fast and abalone, which
(28:16):
is like a big, very expensive kind of seafood. It's
a sea snail and huh it is, yeah, yeah, what
do you think it was? I thought it was more
clam like than snail like that. Well, it's called a
sea snail, but it looks like a clam. Okay, that's
one of those things sort of like never mind, I'm gonna.
(28:38):
I want to know, you have to text it to me.
Oh that's okay, Well, yeah, I'll text it to you.
Um So, these two things, the Akoya oyster and the
abalone uh in Japan and the waters around Japan had
very um nice natural pearls being produced again under pearl
because of overfishing. And in eighteen eight he ate there
(29:00):
was an oyster farmer who figures very highly in the
story name Uh. And this gets a little confusing because
a lot of names are similar, but his name was
Kokichi Miki Moto, and he started working with a professor
name Kochi Ki is that right? Kakichi Kaikichi uh Mitsukuri Uh.
(29:21):
And he was from Tokyo Imperial University, and they started
working together trying to get a technique going for initially
growing these blistered pearls. And they were successful in that
not only could they get that going, but they could
actually industrialize it and make it like a really ramp
up the process and get a lot of them going. Yeah.
Mickey Moto's aim for for starting to cultivate pearls was
(29:43):
because he wanted to democratize pearls. He wanted anybody at
the time to be able to wear a pearl necklace.
And that's why he was, you know, he said about
trying to figure this out. And again, like you said,
the best they could come up with blister pearls, and
they call them half pearls for a reason because you
have to break them off of the shell, that inner shell,
and so you've ruined one side of it, whereas a
true pearl um will form inside the oyster and can
(30:07):
just be kind of plucked out rather easily, and it's
it's a whole it's a whole pearl that's not attached
to the shell. So it seems like if you could
make a blister pearl, you could make a true pearl,
and it just was not that easy. UM and neither
Mickey Moto nor Mitsukuri ever figured it out. Really, it
was actually a student of Mitsukuries, a guy named Tokichi Nishikawa,
(30:30):
who UM actually came up with the the way to
create a genuine pearl through cultivation practices, and the same
process is essentially UM used today. Yeah, it's basically what
they did was they said, hey, let's take what nature does,
and that's like what we have to sit around and
(30:51):
wait every ten thousand molesks to see happen, and let's
let's just do it ourselves. Let's figure out a way
to speed it up and do it by hand. And
they did. They would cut out that you know we
talked about the naker. They would cut out the part
of the oyster, which is the mantle that secretes that naker.
They would artificially put in a little bit of shell. Uh.
(31:12):
Instead of like a grain of sand, they would use.
I think they found that a little like round cutting
of that iridescent shell works best, right. I think they
found that muscle shells work best for some reason. But yeah,
they would make them round or spherical, right, and then
they would put that back into another oyster. I think
of the same variety. I don't think they mix and matched.
(31:35):
And that would basically cause that process to start. They
would say something's in me that shouldn't be in me,
and it would create a little pearl sack has that
little seed in the middle, and it started just coating
it with that substance. Yeah, And so they would surgically
implant shell pieces and like a piece of mantle from
another oyster, which is kind of mangola esque if you
(31:57):
think about it. And they would use little, tiny modified
dental tools to create this surgery um and it was
really hard to do because you can't open an oyster
shell more than two to three centimeters, which is not much,
or else it's it's either going to kill them the oyster,
or it's going to upset it so much that it's
going to reject this this implanted nucleus the seed for
(32:20):
the pearl. So it's really hard to do. And again
this is still the way that they do this, and
it turns out, strangely, there was an entirely other guy
UH named um Tatsuey miss A who was a carpenter
and he was working on his own version of the
exact same thing, apparently independently at the same time in Japan,
(32:41):
and he Uh and Nishikawa went to go patent their methods,
found that the other one had applied for a patent
for the exact same thing, and came to an agreement,
which I think is really sweet because had it been
like Thomas Edison or somebody, that would have been like
legal battles and murders of elephants and all that stuff.
These guys just came to an agreement to call this
process the Nishikawa method. Right. Uh, some people say that, um,
(33:06):
we talked about Seville Kent, who died without having perfected
the non blistered process. Uh. Some accounts do say that
both of these people, which is, you know, basically how
they were working independently on the same process, got their
process from notes from Seville Kent. But I don't think
that's been like proven out, so who knows, It's just
(33:26):
part of the lore. Well yea at this point. I mean, Plus,
the Ville Kent never cracked the blister, the blister pearl barrier. Yeah,
he'll he'll b BP yeah or b P B B
b B blister yeah, the BP B. So Mickey Moto,
who just as a refresher was that original oyster farmer,
(33:49):
was a really good promoter, really good marketer. UM had
a pretty good operation going. In fact, they still the
company is still around today and they still make pearl
jew reach. But they would build these big pearl structures
at displays that expo shows. And he would go around
and talk to like governments and say, hey, this jewelry
(34:10):
is like I know, we're making them by hand, but
it's still like a real pearl, Like look at these
things and sort of had to overcome the uh, these
aren't true pearls argument, Yeah, the diamonique challenge. Yeah, but
you did overcome it. The thing is is they're just
not as valuable, not because they're not real pearls. They
(34:30):
are real pearls that are made from the same stuff
and everything. It's just that humans have intervened and taken
happenstance out of the out of the process. Right. The
reason that they're not as expensive is because there's so
many of them. You can produce them so much more easily.
And so Mickey Moto actually did what he set out
to accomplish, democratized pearls. And now you can get a
(34:50):
strand of pearl like a pearl necklace for like a
hundred bucks if you want. And they're beautiful, gorgeous pearls
that if somebody came up and said which one is
the natural pearl and which one is the cultivated pearl? Uh,
you would not be able to tell no, not at all. Uh.
They were brought over to America and at a really
bad time, just before the Great Depression in nine eight,
(35:14):
but they hung around and then after the Great Depression,
um people started buying pearls and pearl necklaces. And another
thing that happened was they started making just straight up
imitation pearls and these look great too. And Jackie Kennedy's
very famous pearl necklace was not real. It was a
gift from her mother. Uh, they were artificial pearls. I
(35:37):
think a lot of times the pearl necklaces that you
see um can be artificial. And uh they sell like
hotcakes too. Yeah. I looked it up. I could not
find for certain what Jackie Kennedy's um pearls were made of.
But the closest I saw was a guess at glass
that they were made of glass. Everybody, you know, there's
been apparently all kinds of things glass alabaster, and then
(36:00):
they would put everything from egg white to fish scales
to snail slimeh to create that. You know, pearl has
a certain look. It's not just like a plastic wind
looks plastic for a reason, but a good artificial pearl
has a little magic to it as well. Do we
take a break? I think so, all right, we'll take
our last break and we'll come back and finish up
(36:21):
with what's going on today in the world of pearls.
(36:45):
All right. Uh, we're in modern times now and things
are still about the same about the pearls, like genuine
pearls that you're going to get our cultured Uh it is.
If you'd say I want a pearl necklace and I
wanted to be the pearls found from that are natural pearls,
then you got a lot of money laying around and
(37:05):
you're pretty picky. Uh yeah, yeah, that's yeah. But you
can thank Mickeymoto for not having to have to have
a lot of money laying around or to be particularly picky. Um.
And there's a bunch of types of cultured pearls. Uh.
There's a koya, south Sea, Tahitian and fresh water and
depending on the type of mollusk that's used, it's going
(37:26):
to produce different colored gems. Basically, because I don't know
if we said are not. A pearl is considered a
gem even though it's not um like a mineral in
the sense that like a diamond is, but it's still
it still has a crystalline structure, so I guess it's
considered a gem. Plus people just like to wear them
on their foreheads. As I said, But if you want
a black pearl you're gonna have to go down to
(37:47):
Tahiti and get one from the black lip oyster, which
is just a yeah, they're cool, and they're not necessarily
all black. They can be gray, they can be browned,
they can be black, but they'll also they'll also have
like kind of iridescent hints of like greens or purples,
even pink. I saw oh pink pearls, well, pink black pearls,
which is uh if you if you're talking about just
(38:11):
sort of the standard traditional classic pearl. Uh. They are
produced in Japan and China, and those are those original
cultured a koya pearls still to this day. Um. And
then I guess you know the fresh water pearls. Those
are the ones that come from the Tennessee River, among
other places. Uh, fresh water mussels produced them. They are
(38:32):
um not as expensive. They come in all kinds of
shapes and sizes from lakes and ponds and I guess
rivers if it's the Tennessee River. And uh, they're also
little things called like rice pearls that look like what
you would think look like little grains of rice. Um.
They tried to perfect the process of getting them less
rice like over the years and found that if they
(38:54):
just switched the species of muscle, then they could do
that and it worked. Yes, And here is a little
tipped for you. If you want to impress everyone at
the country club, you obviously belong to. UM. Next time
you see somebody wearing pearls that are not spherical, tell
them you love their baroque pearls, because a baroque pearl
is anything but around shaped pearl. Yeah. If you look
(39:17):
up baroque pearl necklace, it looks almost like a necklace
of molars. Yeah, weirdly they do. Um, And that's a
that's a natural looking pearl. Again, a perfectly spherical, even
close to perfectly spherical pearl is really rare in nature. Um.
And so more often than not, you're going to see
(39:37):
everything from like blobby misshapen ones that, like you said,
look like molars, ones that are like teardrop shape. There's
a bunch of different cool shapes that that you know,
it can be produced as natural pearls, and all of
those are broke right. UM. It is still kind of
a rare thing to cultivate successfully, or to culture successfully, UM,
(39:59):
a pearl old they've gotten the process down pretty good.
But uh, it takes about ten to eighteen months, and
about half of the oysters even survive that nucleation process,
like you were talking about, because it's really just very
very precise and it is very finicky. Uh. And of
those half, only about five percent will end up producing
a high quality pearl. So when you're pearl uh culturing,
(40:24):
I was about to say farming, I guess it's farming
in a way. Um, you are making most of your
profit about from those that five percent of the fifty
percent end up becoming high quality pearls. And you can
still do some stuff with a non high quality, but
you're not going to get the big top dollar prices.
And again that's just from cultured pearls. Again, it just
(40:46):
kind of reminds you how how really rare the really
nice natural ones are. And you said that it takes
ten to eighteen months. I saw in some cases they'll
they'll give the pearl up to four years to develop.
And while they're while they're cultivating or cult during the
the oysters, the pearls in the oysters, um, they will
scrub the oysters three times a year protect them from
(41:08):
predators and disease. These are like the most well cared
for oysters, which is great, but again they've had some
other foreign objects surgically implanted in them, and then when
the pearl is taken out, I don't believe the oyster
typically survives that process, which, if you really stop and
think about it, is is pretty mean. It's actually a
(41:28):
really mean, tortuous process. They're cared for while they're being raised,
it's true, but they're killed to get the pearl out
of them. They're just basically a machine to produce a pearl.
Is how the pearl industry views oysters or other mollusks
that that produce pearls for it, well, hopefully they become
dinner and then nope, part of someone's driveway. They definitely
(41:49):
do not. They don't need really know and one of
the I think what Gaston Vivez actually might have come
up with this technique if it's not older, but I
think it's still in Useton places build harvest the oysters
when it's pearl harvesting time, and just to make the
process easier, they'll dump the oysters into huge piles. Cover
the piles so that things can't get to them, like
(42:09):
predators or like vultures or whatever. Um, and let the
oysters rot, and then the pearls are just easier to
retrieve after the fleshy part of the oysters gone. Truly,
some of those dudes are eating oysters. Some of them are.
And if you how about this, chuck, I've got a little,
a little fact for you that's going to keep you
off the oysters forever. Um, you you don't. If you're
(42:31):
eating a raw oyster, you're not dead oyster. Everyone does that.
It's really I didn't realize that really. Yeah, No, I'd
never really thought about it. But there's there's they're probably dead,
but if they're dead, they're freshly dead, and they're so
freshly dead it's possible that they're not actually dead yet.
So you might be eating them live when you eat
them raw. I hadn't thought about that. It makes me sad. Yeah,
(42:52):
I think they once you, I mean you've shucked oysters before, really, no,
I might have my oysters for me. Well. Part of
the shucking process involves cutting it loose from its shell
where it's attached, and I think that's that's that lifeline. Um, yeah,
I mean, hey, it's just it's a renewable resource. But uh,
(43:14):
Peter obviously is going to say, now, making pearls is
not something people do just because you're you're messing with
an animal to get something from it. Yeah, so pet
is of course going to be against us. Sure, and
there is like a moral question about it is morally questionable,
but there are some real upsides to it. One is
it gives another industry to um to areas that might
(43:35):
be subject to over fishing, so that they don't have
to over fish just to make money. They can raise
oysters as well for pearls. Um. The oysters definitely clean
the water in the area that they filter out all
sorts of impurities and problems. UM. So that actually does
make the water cleaner and um as long as they're
not messing with like the coral reefs or the local
(43:57):
ecosystems to to create these farms, and they're doing it
in a more sustainable manner, it actually is a fairly
sustainable industry. It's just again mean to the oysters or
other mollusks. Are you off oysters now? I don't know.
You'll have to ask me when somebody presents me with
a platter of them and some crackers and and uh,
mignon Net, Mignonett. You gotta order that stuff? Uh, you
(44:21):
just randomly get presented with platters of oysters? What kind
of life you live in at the country club when
I wear my string of molar pearls? Uh? Should we
go over kind of quickly a couple of these um
expensive famous pearls. Yeah, definitely, so you know, if you
want to talk about super expensive, super huge pearls, Uh,
(44:41):
there are a handful that. Um, you know, sometimes they
look like super large molar Sometimes they look like Olivia
described one as looking like a giant white brain. Um,
they're they're not very good looking. Um, yet they can
be really expensive, just as prized collectibles. I think. Um,
it's not like I don't think they've discovered a process
(45:02):
where they can take a big, large brain looking oyster
and break it down into a pearl and break it
down into like five thousand perfect little pearls, right, No,
not that I know of. No, it's more just like
they prize it for its weirdness and rarity. Yeah, yeah,
there's one. I think the biggest one we could find
is the seventy five pound pearl of Puerto And the
thing is, whenever one of these comes out. Everybody's like,
(45:24):
that's so expensive, it's so valuable. That one was valued
at a hundred million dollars and it was found by
a fisherman who kept it under his bed for a
decade in the Philippines. Now, all of a sudden, he's
sitting on a hundred million dollar pearl um or I
should say, sleeping over one um. But it's never been sold,
so no one knows if it actually is worth that.
It's worth whatever somebody will pay for it, basically exactly.
(45:47):
It's a very good point. But there is one called
La Peregrina, and it is arguably the most famous pearl
in the world. Is an egg shaped pearl. It's been
um fashioned into different necklaces and different jewelry. It's appeared
in poor tricks of queens, including I believe Elizabeth the
First and then a bunch of Spanish queens over the
years because it was part of the Spanish Crown jewels.
(46:09):
And then it finally made its way into a necklace
that Richard Burton bought for Elizabeth Taylor in nine very
famously so in that need, imagine wearing a piece of
jewelry that you knew was in a portrait of a
queen that was made hundreds several hundred years ago, and
now you're wearing it too, Like that's just cool. That's
one thing I like about stuff like this, Like a
pearl is something that can you know, make its way
(46:31):
through time and history from from person to person. Yeah,
and part of Hollywood history. I mean, one of the
great offen on romances in Hollywood history. Some people would
prize it just for that, from Richard Burton to Elizabeth
Taylor's neck. And uh, I think we should also mention
at least the people like, come on, I don't care
about giant Mueller's brain looking things. Guys, what is the
(46:56):
biggest like pearl pearl, Like the biggest really round owned
natural looking pearl. Uh? And I think the biggest one
they found is about and it's pretty big if you
think about a near spherical pearl um about point seven
inches right, um, and that's big. It's thirty three carrots.
If you know anything about diamonds of thirties, imagine a
(47:17):
thirty three caret diamond, but a pearl instead. And I
think it's sold for a million dollars in two thousand fourteen,
appropriately enough a million buckaroos. Uh, yeah, you've got anything else?
I got nothing else. All right, well, Chuck's got nothing else.
I've got nothing else. And since I just said that
out loud, that means it's time for listener mail. Uh.
(47:39):
And I'm gonna call this do do, which is usually
your trumpet. Powell would like, yeah, please do do do do. Oh.
You went an octave higher. Yeah, very impressive. The stuff
you should know five k is all set and ready
for another year. If you're listening, you don't know what
this is. The stuff you should know Army on the
(48:00):
Facebook page, they get together, they plan out a five
k race uh slash walk and it's just a very
fun community event that happens all over the world. I
think it's not like they all meet together in Kansas
that Aaron Cooper's house and run from his driveway to
the nearest grocery store, which is at least five k Uh.
(48:22):
They do this at the same time in the spirit
of all being together. And the dates are October twenty
one to October one, so it's a rolling race, Uh
it is. They took a vote online and the title
of the race this year is the s y five
(48:42):
k is ready are you in commemoration of the tenure
anniversary of the camera ad that ran. It's probably still
running for all I know. It definitely is on some
episode somewhere. Um there is an event page if you
want to find out more. They're getting all the details
worked out still, but I wanted to drop this early.
Just go to this Stuff you Should Know Army facebook page,
(49:04):
do a little search for the five K. They probably
have something pinned. Uh. There is someone named the listener
named Sarah Denny what Moore who is suggested a costume element.
If people are into that and they're working out the
prizes and things, and uh, it's all going. So if
you're into community and exercise and being a part of
something cool, go check it out. Uh. And this, of
(49:26):
course was an update from Aaron Mizzell. Aaron Mizell, Aaron,
I don't know which way I've said it in the past,
but I'm saying Mozzelle, Mozzelle. It's probably just Mozzell. Aaron's great,
She's been around forever. She was a movie crush or
two and that was still a thing. Yeah, and she's
a long time member of the Stuff You Should Not Army,
And maybe even the chair of the Stuff you Should
Know five K I'm not sure. She's definitely up there. Um.
(49:50):
And if you want to be like Aaron and let
us know something awesome happening, we want to hear about it.
You can send it to us in an email to
stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot m H. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(50:15):
H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!