H. Tracey Hallpassed away at his home early on the morning of July 25, 2008.

H. Tracey Hallpassed away at his home early on the morning of July 25, 2008.

Post Date: 12 Nov 2008    Viewed: 38 H. Tracey Hall, often referred to as the father of man-made industrial diamond, passed away at his home early on the morning of July 25, 2008. He was 88 years of age.



Howard Tracey Hall was born on October 20, 1919, in Ogden, Utah. After completing his B.S. and then an M.S. in chemistry at the University of Utah in 1943, he served for two years as a Navy ensign. Returning to the university in 1946, he received his PhD in 1948. Two months later he started work at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

In 1951, GE had recently begun a program to attempt to synthesise diamonds from carbon and had assigned Francis Bundy and Herbert Strong, physicists from the Mechanical Investigations Section, with that task. GE management assembled the chemists at the lab and asked for volunteers. Tracey Hall stepped forward and shortly afterwards another chemist, Robert Wentorf, came on board.

Undoubtedly, Tracey Hall's most significant contribution to the research work was the development of a unique variation of the numerous piston and cylinder devices turned out by the group. All had suffered from the common problem in piston and cylinder devices - failure at the junction of the sidewalls and bottom of the bore. Using lateral thinking he solved this problem by eliminating the bottom and using two tops back to back. Thus the device called the "belt press" was born.



On the morning of December 16th, 1954, Tracey Hall used his new carbide belt apparatus to run an experiment on the press. A surprise awaited him upon breaking open the cell, as there in front of him he could see "the flashing light from dozens of tiny crystals." Subsequent tests and duplication runs convinced GE management that the team had indeed succeeded in transforming carbon to diamond. Run after run produced diamonds using Tracey Hall's belt press.



On February 15 1955, GE held a press conference to announce that they had successfully synthesised diamonds. GE was subsequently granted a patent for diamond synthesis. Other patents were granted for other apparatus developed by the group, but the Hall Belt (US Patent 2,941248) was the most practical and was later scaled up to become the first production press and the model for diamond synthesis for the future.



Tracey Hall left GE in 1955 to become Director of Research at Brigham Young University, and over his 30 years at BYU, became a highly regarded professor of chemistry and mentor of many graduate students. During that time he also invented the tetrahedral and cubic presses, which allowed him to continue his research in the field of high pressure.



In 1966, Tracey Hall partnered with two BYU professors, Bill Pope and Duane Horton, to form Megadiamond, now owned by Smith International, a company that manufactures diamond products for industrial applications. Many other diamond-producing companies, based on Tracey Hall's inventions, have emerged worldwide: these include Novatek, US Synthetic, and PreCorp, all based in Utah.



Today, a wide variety of synthetic diamond products are used throughout all of industry, and it would be safe to say that there are few people whose lives are not significantly impacted by the used of industrial diamonds. Much of the credit for that can go to Tracey Hall.