Up until 50 years ago, only Mother Nature could make diamonds.

But on Dec. 16, 1954, H. Tracy Hall, an Ogden native and a scientist with General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., broke that monopoly when he successfully created the first man-made diamond from carbon.

Hall's legacy is a multibillion dollar industry that his invention helped create in the past few decades and several generations of synthetic diamond cutter, grit and product makers. These cutters are used in industries including mining, oil and gas, aerospace, automotive, glass and ceramics, electronics and construction in Utah, nationally and globally.

Thursday, more than 150 industry participants gathered at a symposium at the Provo Marriott to mark the 50th anniversary of the first successful diamond synthesis process and to pay tribute to Hall, who now suffers from Alzheimer's disease.

Diamond cutters are typically found in masonry saws, mining drill bits, polishing machinery and cutting tools. But synthetic diamonds are increasingly used in everyday applications such as dentist drills, masonry saws, glass cutters, polishing equipment and even knife sharpening.

Eye glasses that once took weeks to order are now available within an hour, and road repairs that once required noisy jackhammers can now be made with precision-grinding diamond saw blades.

More than 10 industry experts spoke Thursday on the need to invest more in research and development to find new applications for the synthetic diamond, to reduce its wear-out rate, and foster a more open forum to share ideas on innovating technology.

That focus had led to a bout of industry consolidation in Utah in recent months. These include Provo-based maker Novatek Corp.'s $21 million merger with ReedHycalog, an oil and gas drill-bit maker, in June, and Orem-based U.S. Synthetic Corp.'s merger with Dover Resources, a diversified industrial products maker, in September.

"Novatek is reinventing itself by jumping on the trend toward using synthetic diamond picks instead of tungsten carbide picks to break up asphalt and resurface roads," said Louis Pope, founder of U.S. Synthetic. Novatek began as a synthetic diamond cutter maker for the oil and gas industry, and is now exploring applications with asphalt.

And U.S. Synthetic, an Orem maker of synthetic diamond grit, specializes in making polycrystalline diamond inserts for the oil and gas drilling and mining industry. Today, the company is also exploring potential medical applications for synthetic diamonds in hip replacements.

Terry Kane, executive director of Industrial Diamond Association of America Inc., agreed.

"The aerospace and automotive industries are using more exotic materials like superalloys such as silica aluminum, which is light but strong, to make planes and cars, and the only thing that cuts through these alloys are synthetic diamond cutters," Kane said.

All this would not have been possible without Hall's pioneering invention -- the belt press, which replicated the critical high temperature/high pressure conditions deep within the earth where diamonds are formed.

His subsequent inventions, the tetrahedral and cubic diamond press systems, were used for the production of synthetic diamonds.

Christian Hultner, managing director of Element Six, formerly De Beers Industrial Diamonds, attributed the existence of the South African synthetic and natural industrial-grade diamond supplier to Hall's belt press invention.

"We would not be competitive without the belt press," said Hultner as he presented Hall with an hourglass filled with Element Six's best synthetic diamond grit on Thursday.

"But now, evolving the belt press to beat the cost of used technology to become more competitive is critical."

Born in 1919 and raised on a farm in Marriott, a rural northern Utah town, Hall became interested in real life heroes as a young boy, particularly men like Thomas Edison. He devoured books about Edison at the Ogden public library.

At a young age, he determined he would one day work for Edison's company, General Electric. That dream became a reality in 1948, after he obtained his doctorate degree from the University of Utah and joined General Electric Research labs in New York. Hall, who became director of research and professor of chemistry at Brigham Young University in 1955, also contributed to the founding of several industrial diamond product makers in Utah.

In 1966, he partnered with Bill Pope and M. Duane Horton, two other BYU professors, to found MegaDiamond in Provo.

Today, MegaDiamond is owned by Smith Tool. But other Utah companies were formed as a result of that venture, including Novatek, US Synthetic, and PreCorp, a Spanish Fork specialty tool maker.

To date, the industry generates more than $100 million in sales annually and has created more than 500 jobs in Utah, said David Hall, founder of Novatek and Hall's son. Globally, the finished diamond tools industry is valued at up to $5 billion, while the raw materials industry is valued at more than $1 billion, said Kane of Industrial Diamond Association.

Much of the credit there can go to Hall, who on the morning of Dec. 16, 1954, knew he had created history when he first saw "the flashing light from dozens of tiny crystals ... and knew that diamonds had finally been made by man."