The development of laser heating began only 8 years after Charles Weir, of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), made the first diamond anvil cell and Alvin Van Valkenburg, NBS, realized the potential of being able to see the sample while under pressure. William Bassett and his colleague Taro Takahashi focused a laser beam on the sample while under pressure. The first laser heating system used a single 7 joule pulsed ruby laser that heated the sample to 3000 °C while at 260 kilobars. This was sufficient to convert graphite to diamond. The major flaws within the first system related to control and temperature measurement.
Temperature measurement was initially done by Basset using an optical pyrometer to measure the intensity of the incandescent light from the sample. Colleagues at UC Berkeley were better able to utilize the black-body radiation and more accurately measure the temperature. The hot spot produced by the laser also created large thermal gradients in between the portions of sample that were hit by the focused laser and those that were not. The solution to this problem is ongoing but advances have been made with the introduction of a double-sided approach.