Diamond anvil cell, 50th birthday

The year 2008 marked the fiftieth birthday of the diamond anvil cell. Its birth took place when Alvin Van Valkenburg, while working with his colleagues, Charles E. Weir, Ellis R. Lippincott, and Elmer N. Bunting, first realized that he could look right through one of the diamond anvils and see a sample while it was at high pressure. In the following years, these scientists and many others adapted the diamond anvil cell to a wide variety of analytical techniques that have provided an impressive amount of information about materials at high pressures and high temperatures. But, virtually all of those techniques start with looking into the diamond anvil cell.