The innovation centre dates from 2013, and was born out of a desire to group E6’s R&D teams in one place; it also rationalised its manufacturing facilities across the world. The lab occupies the front plot of Harwell Campus, a science park that is home to around 200 organisations. The European Space Agency is across the road, and it is a short walk to the UK’s Synchrotron, which fires electrons at near-light speeds around a ring.

E6 prides itself on a “start-up” ethos; like Google, it allows its staff to use 10pc of their time to work on pet projects. The 180-strong workforce at Harwell includes people from 54 countries and there are free language classes and sports teams. Hühn acknowledges that Brexit “doesn’t make life easier” when it comes to recruitment, but insists Harwell’s location near Oxford is attractive.

While cutting tools are the bread and butter of E6’s work, it is also forging ahead into more exotic areas. Synthetic diamonds are in the race to become the bedrock of quantum computing – a theoretical field that promises massive computational power that eschews the digital technology of “classical” machines.

Quantum computing involves the entanglement of particles in the sub-atomic realm. When one particle becomes ‘entangled’ with another, it synchronises with its partner, even when they have no physical connection. Manipulating one can change the state of the other. Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”.

Scientists at E6 and Harvard achieved a breakthrough last year when they proved that one particle could alter another 1.3km away without any possible transfer of data between them. “It fundamentally proved this entanglement process is a physical reality - there’s no other explanation for it,” says scientist Matthew Markham.

Yet the properties of diamonds get even weirder. It transpires that diamonds with a ‘nitrogen vacancy defect’ - a gap in the lattice that makes up the crystal - are highly sensitive to magnetic waves at room temperature. The hope is that these diamonds, embedded in handheld scanners, could eventually replace MRI scanners; experiments have already shown that a red diamond can pick up the firing of an axon in the brain of a marine worm. “In 10 years’ time you could envisage having a helmet with diamond sensors that would be the equivalent of MRI sensors,” says Markham.

Scientists also believe that these diamonds could one day use magnetic distortions caused by the sun to triangulate their position on the earth. This would eliminate the need for GPS, which relies on satellite signals to tell a driver where they are; it could also make driverless cars a reality. Currently a diamond with an NV defect has been calibrated to detect the magnetic signature from a car at 300m.

Many of these experiments are decades away from practical applications. But, as Hühn remarks, sometimes they have to “evangelise” about diamonds to create a market for their products. “We need to demonstrate what can be done and then make it transparent to the market,” he says.

David Fuller's view

And it all starts with carbon – amazing.

Look what lies ahead: “… quantum computers may theoretically be able to solve certain problems in a few days that would take millions of years on a classical computer. (Source: Nasa)”

This era of accelerating technological innovation has only just begun.  Moreover, it will only be limited by: 1) the availability of time on earth, which hopefully lasts for at least a few million more years; 2) human destructive instincts, hopefully kept in check; 3) more optimistically, the extent of human imagination and creativity; 4) the creativity of artificial intelligence aided by quantum computers.

Unfortunately, E6 is not a publicly listed company.