Antonine Lavoiser discovered, to his dismay, that when a diamond burned, after turning fiery red, it vanished into thin air, leaving no trace, no ash. He repeated the experiment in a vacuum and found that pure graphite remained. The two materials, diamond and graphite, were therefore composed of the same element: pure carbon. Thus began a race to transform graphite into diamond. But it wasn’t until 1953 that the result was achieved, with the first synthetic diamonds.
