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Bill Pope: 'Nothing is simple'

Bill Pope (MS ’49, PhD ’58) still heeds three words of wisdom given to him by John Sundlen, the department’s former master shop mechanic. “Nothing is simple,” said Pope, who turned 86 in 2008. “This has turned out to be very true.”

Fast forward from durable bits of advice to durable drill bits. In 1992, one of Pope’s U.S. Synthetic customers reported that a drill bit equipped with one of his company’s synthetic diamond cutters broke a world record by grinding through more than 240,000 feet of rock without needing to be replaced.

This feat inspired Pope to think of the medical applications of synthetic diamonds, which can be used to make bearings for artificial knees, hips and more. Pope founded Dimicron in 1996 for this reason. “Think of lifetime prosthetic joints,” he said.

Pope was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1922. He conducted experiments in his basement until an explosion rocked the house and his parents asked him to stop.

When Pope was 20 years old, his Army ROTC group at the University of Utah was called into active duty during World War II. After basic training, he married Margaret, his wife of 65 years, and served for three years as an officer in the Infantry and Engineering Corps in the United States, the Philippines and Japan.

After Pope’s military service, he returned to the University of Utah and completed his bachelor’s degree in 1947. He received a fellowship to UW and completed his master’s degree in 1949.

Pope left UW before completing his PhD to work for American Oil Company. Despite the valuable industry experience he gained, his advice to graduate students is to “never, ever, if possible, leave campus before completing your thesis.”

Pope returned to UW and completed his PhD in 1958, then started as a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU). In fall of 1959, he took a three-year leave to organize a graduate program in chemical engineering at Abadan Institute of Technology in Iran.

Pope returned to BYU in 1962 and served for four years as department chair. In 1966 with two other professors, he founded Megadiamond, a supplier of synthetic diamond grit.

He retired from BYU in 1978, the same year his son Louis founded U.S. Synthetic. Bill joined the company, which became the leading international supplier of synthetic diamonds for use in gas and oil drill bits.

Pope has one son, three daughters and 28 grandchildren. He is the winner of the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology, Business Man of the Year by the Provo and Orem Chamber of Commerce, and many other awards.

More than 50 years after Pope shined as UW student, he still puts in a full day of work at Dimicron or U.S Synthetic. His colleagues and customers might be inclined to give him three more words: “diamonds are forever.”