Tungsten

Tungsten was first used more than 350 years ago, when Chinese porcelain makers used the element to give their ceramics a warm, peachy color. But tungsten wasn’t known to the Western world until 1783, when Spanish chemists (and brothers) Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar extracted the element from the mineral wolframite, calling the discovery wolfram.

Today, in most European languages, element 74 is still called wolfram. But in English, French, and other languages, element 74 is called “tungsten,” which means “heavy stone” in Swedish. That’s because in 1781, two years before the Elhuyar brothers isolated tungsten, Swedish-German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele suggested that an acid derived from scheelite—a mineral that was then called tungsten—might be reduced into a new metal.

Since then, element 74 has gone by both names. But everyone agrees that the element’s symbol is the letter W!

Tungsten is a steel-grey to tin-white metal. Impure tungsten is brittle and hard to work with, but pure tungsten is soft enough to be cut with a hacksaw.

Tungsten has the highest melting point and the highest tensile strength of all metals. The element is non-reactive, too, meaning that it doesn’t interact with water, acids, or oxygen at room temperature.

Mixing tungsten into steel can make the steel much tougher.

For much of the twentieth century, tungsten and tungsten alloys were used as lightbulb filaments. But because these lightbulbs aren’t very energy efficient, they’ve been gradually phased out.

Tungsten can also make alloys stronger, and its high melting point means that it can be used to manufacture things like rocket nozzles, which must be able to withstand getting extremely hot without melting.

Tungsten carbide is applied to cutting and drilling tools that are used for metalworking, mining, woodworking, construction, and petroleum manufacturing.

Tungsten can also be made into contact points in electronics, or the metal can be used as components in electrical furnaces.

Tungsten is a relatively rare element. In nature, you’ll find tungsten in four stable (non-radioactive) isotopes (tungsten-182, -183, -184, and -186).

One naturally occurring radioisotope, tungesten-180, has an extremely long half-life, of about 2 quintillion years (1.8×10¹⁸).

Most tungsten comes from the minerals scheelite and wolframite—the same minerals that Scheele and the Elhuyar brothers analyzed more than two hundred years ago! Today, China, Russia, Canada, Bolivia, Vietnam, Portugal, Australia, Rwanda, Spain, and Brazil are all major tungsten producers.