The Magnificent World of Tumbled Stones

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The Magnificent World of Tumbled Stones

Rock tumbling began millions of years ago when waves and streams mixed Earth’s first sediments. These natural processes shape and smooth the rocks, but they rarely produce a highly polished gemstone.

Indigenous people observed this natural tumbling and decided to create some controlled “rock tumbling environments” where carefully selected stones could be tumbled through a sequence of abrasives to produced brightly polished gems.

Tumbled Stone Popularity Explosion

The early success of Swoboda Jewelry and Craftstones fueled public interest in tumbled stones throughout the United States. This inspired many other native people to develop rock tumblers. By 1955, at least one dozen companies were offering tumblers, "polished baroques", bell caps, and tumbler plans through ads in Lapidary Journal magazine. By the 1960s, rock tumblers were being manufactured in the United States by a large number of companies.

Almost any issue of Lapidary Journal published during the late 1950s and 1960s had ads offering rock tumblers from a variety of manufacturers. The April 1964 "Rockhound Buyer's Guide" issue of Lapidary Journal listed seventy-eight companies as tumbler manufacturers [7]. Most of these tumblers were small rotary machines that processed a few pounds of rock. The first vibratory rock tumblers were also produced in the 1950s.