Everyone has that one person that made a difference in life; a good boss, a wise co-worker who really trained you, even a salesperson who had the right answers at the right time. And it’s a sure thing that none of them were named Howard Tracy Hall. Gather 100 people in the trade together in a room today, and maybe one might recognize the name but not the person. Show his picture, and everyone would draw a blank. But for Hall, maybe 99 out of those 100 people wouldn’t be in the business. When he died in late July 2008, he earned obituaries in the nation’s major papers for his biggest scientific accomplishment – one we couldn’t do without in working with hard surfaces. This isn’t some obscure believe-it-or-not story about the guy who drove the taxi that got the atom-bomb plutonium to the train in time to start its long journey to Tinian and the new world beyond. This is someone who, frankly, to whom you owe part of your trade every day. Hall (who didn’t care for the Howard part of his name and went by Tracy) probably didn’t come closer to granite than the occasional scientific test table and camping in the mountains. He spent his youth in his hometown of Ogden, Utah; his ambition, as he told his fourth-grade teacher, was to work for a particular U.S. company. Aside from a two-year detour in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Hall pursued his goal, earning a B.A., M.A. and PhD. from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. A few months after he received his doctoral degree in 1948, he got the job he dreamed of in grade school; he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., to work as a scientist at the General Electric Research Laboratory. In the postwar period, GE brought plenty of good things to life (and some handsome profits for its treasury). Hall got his chance in 1951, when he joined the company’s Project Superpressure. The project had met with limited success, due in part to a lack of an adequate press to create sufficient pressure. While work progressed on building a new press, Hall designed an adaptation to use on an old press, and cajoled various colleagues for the materials and machine-shop time to make the alterations. On the morning of Dec. 16, 1954, Hall loaded the pressure chamber with troilite (a mineral often found in meteorites) and tantalum (a transition metal) and ran an experiment. When the machine unloaded and Hall looked into the chamber, he found the substance that he, the team at the GE project, and literally thousands of scientists through several centuries strived to acquire. Tracy Hall found diamonds. More accurately, he made them. Not gem-quality stones mined from the earth, but material produced from other elements under extreme pressure. Diamonds that would, through refinement of the manufacturing process, be used in glass grinding, dental drilling and … sawing and shaping of granite, marble, quartz surfaces, and just about everything coming through a fabrication shop. The problem with Hall’s discovery was that he required proof that the diamonds didn’t show up because he seeded the chamber with the real thing. On the last day of 1954, fellow GE scientist and project team member Hugh H. Woodbury ran the same experiment and got the same results.

Finally, after running yet another run of the chamber – with Hall out of the building to eliminate any charge of scientific skullduggery – the diamonds appeared again. On Valentine’s Day 1955, GE got the privilege of announcing that it could make diamonds. What did Hall get? A $10 savings bond, along with other project managers, for the diamonds, and another bond for adapting the press to make them. In 1955, Hall left GE.