HISTORY OF TANZANITE
Manuel d'Souza, a tailor and part-time gold prospector living in Arusha (Tanzania), found transparent fragments of vivid blue and blue-purple gem crystals on a ridge near Mererani, some 40 km (25 mi) southeast of Arusha.[8] He assumed that the mineral was olivine (peridot) but after soon realizing it wasn't, he concluded it was "dumortierite", a blue non-gem mineral. Shortly thereafter, the stones were shown to John Saul, a Nairobi-based consulting geologist and gemstone wholesaler who was then mining aquamarine in the region around Mount Kenya.
Saul, with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., who later discovered the famous ruby deposits in the Tsavo area of Kenya, eliminated dumortierite and cordierite as possibilities, and sent samples to his father, Hyman Saul, vice president at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. Hyman Saul brought the samples across the street to the Gemological Institute of America who correctly identified the new gem as a variety of the mineral zoisite. Correct identification was also made by mineralogists at Harvard University, the British Museum, and Heidelberg University, but the very first person to get the identification right was Ian McCloud, a Tanzanian government geologist based in Dodoma.[9][10]
Scientifically called "blue zoisite", the gemstone was renamed as tanzanite by Tiffany & Co., who wanted to capitalize on the rarity and SINGLE LOCATION of the gem, and thought that "blue zoisite" (which might be pronounced like "blue suicide") wouldn't sell well.[11] Tiffany's original campaign advertised that tanzanite could now be found in TWO places: "in TANZANIA and at TIFFANY's".
From 1967, an estimated two million carats of tanzanite were mined in Tanzania before the mines were nationalized by the Tanzanian government in 1971.
