Tungsten

Category: transition metal Atomic number: 74 Colour: silvery white Melting point: 3,422°C (6,192°F) Boiling point: 5,555°C (10,031°F) First identified: 1783

In the seventeenth century, Chinese porcelain makers used a tungsten pigment to create a lovely peach colour. Around the same time, in Europe, tin smelters would complain about how much their yield of tin fell when a certain ore was present – they called it ‘wolf’s foam’, because it devoured the metal much as wolves devoured sheep – the name wolframite, for the mineral, probably derives from this usage.

After a few other scientists came close, the credit for tungsten’s discovery is generally given to two Spanish brothers, the chemists Juan and Fausto Elhuyar. In 1783, they produced an acidic metal oxide and managed to reduce it to tungsten by heating it with carbon. They named it ‘wolfram’.

It would come to be used for the filaments in incandescent lightbulbs, because it has the highest melting point of all metals. It is also used in quartz halogen lamps, where the addition of iodine allows it to be heated up even higher (creating a brighter light). Tungsten carbide is an extremely hard compound often used for drilling and cutting tools: it is used in mining and metal working as well as for high-performance dental drills. On a more prosaic level, biro (or ballpoint) pens have tungsten carbide ‘balls’ at the writing point.

You Say Tungsten, I Say Wolfram

The controversy over whether the metal should be called tungsten (the designation given to it by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who studied the metal and named it after the Swedish words for ‘heavy stone’), or wolfram, was theoretically settled in the early 1950s when the IUPAC ruled that ‘columbium’ should be called niobium and ‘wolfram’ tungsten. However, the name of wolfram is still reflected in the chemical symbol, and is occasionally still used, especially in Spain, where discontent lingers that the more poetic name chosen by the Elyuhar brothers has been abolished.