After the 1797 discovery that diamond was pure carbon,[3] many attempts were made to convert various cheap forms of carbon into diamond.[4] The earliest successes were reported by James Ballantyne Hannay in 1879[5] and by Ferdinand Frédéric Henri Moissan in 1893. Their method involved heating charcoal at up to 3500 °C with iron inside a carbon crucible in a furnace. Whereas Hannay used a flame-heated tube, Moissan applied his newly developed electric arc furnace, in which an electric arc was struck between carbon rods inside blocks of lime.[6] The molten iron was then rapidly cooled by immersion in water. The contraction generated by the cooling supposedly produced the high pressure required to transform graphite into diamond. Moissan published his work in a series of articles in the 1890s.[7]