The man who made squares hip: remembering Henry Grossbard.(Trade Lives)(Biography)

Henry Grossbard had been cutting diamonds for thirty years when he made the discovery that turned him into a legend.

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And he did it, primarily, to stand out from the crowd.

"I always wanted to have my own special edge or niche," he said. "I never wanted to do what everyone else did. I wanted to do something different."

It was 1976. Emerald cuts had fallen out of favor. "I always liked them and said, 'Let me see what I can do to play around and put some life in it,'" he recalled. Grossbard wanted a stone that fused the elegance of emeralds (which use step cuts) with the brilliance one sees in rounds and other rounded shapes (which use brilliant cuts). His solution: a combination of the two, a kind of "brilliantized" step.

Creating this was no small task. For two months Grossbard experimented, using actual diamonds as expensive guinea pigs. "I never used a drafting paper or pencil," he said. "I didn't use math. I used diamonds."

Once he created his new shape, his …