The method universally employed for cutting plane surfaces or facets on diamonds has been to place the diamond in contact with a flat cast-iron lap charged with diamond powder and rotated at about 2,000 revolutions per minute.In the work described in this paper it was found that by producing a high-voltage electric arc at the contact between the diamond and the lap, the cutting rate is materially increased for all orientations of the diamond, and good progress can be made directly on a natural octahedron face, where cutting without the arc is almost impossible.By applying the arc to a diamond saw the sawing rate is greatly increased, and diamonds can be sawed regardless of the orientation of the cut relative to the crystal axes.
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Peters et al. (1945) studied this question.