Alvin Van Valkenburg, Jr. (12 August 1913, Schenectady, New York – 5 December 1991, Tucson, Arizona) was an experimental physicist, geologist, geochemist, and inventor, known as one of the four co-inventors of the diamond anvil cell (DAC).
After returning to Schenectady to teach at Union College, he moved to the Boston area, where he worked from 1941 to 1945 at the Charleston Navy Yard as a physicist in charge of degaussing ships.
By the early 1950s ... John Jamieson and his group at Chicago and Van and several others at NBS were experimenting with single crystals of diamond, both as pressure vessels and as the pressure-transmitting medium.
[1]Van Valkenburg is generally considered the originator of the practice of placing a washer-shaped gasket of extremely thin (about .3 mm) metal foil between the two diamond faces of the DAC.
[1][2] The gasket (made of a metal such as rhenium or tungsten) flows under ultra-high pressure and fills the central hole with fluid to achieve hydrostatic conditions.