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Portrait of Tungsten

Science · Chemistry

Tungsten

1783

Chemistry — transition metals

Tungsten is element 74, a hard grey-white transition metal with the highest melting point of any element, 3,422 °C, and the highest boiling point too. Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed in 1781 that a new acid could be made from the mineral now called scheelite, and in 1783 the Spanish brothers Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar isolated the metal itself by reducing that acid with charcoal, taking their name for it from the ore wolframite. English kept the Swedish name "tung sten", heavy stone, but the symbol W preserves the rival name wolfram — one of the classic quiz traps, since no letter of the English name appears in the symbol.

How to spot them

  • ▸The highest melting point of any metal, 3,422 °C
  • ▸Symbol W, which shares not a single letter with its English name
  • ▸Wolframite and scheelite are its principal ores
  • ▸Light-bulb filaments, welding electrodes, darts and armour-piercing shot
  • ▸Its carbide tips drill bits and rolls in the ball of a ballpoint pen

Key facts

Symbol W, from a German ore name meaning roughly 'wolf's froth'

Medieval Saxon tin miners said the ore devoured tin as a wolf devours sheep

The element with the highest melting point, 3,422 °C

It also has the highest boiling point of any element, around 5,930 °C

Isolated in 1783 by the Elhuyar brothers from the ore wolframite (1783)

Carl Wilhelm Scheele had made the corresponding acid from scheelite two years earlier

Its drawn filament replaced carbon in the light bulb from 1909 (1909)

William Coolidge at General Electric worked out how to make the brittle metal ductile

Its English name is Swedish for 'heavy stone'

From 'tung sten', the old Swedish name for the mineral scheelite

Element 74, alloyed into darts and fishing weights for its density

At 19.25 g/cm³ it is about as dense as gold and uranium

Key ideas

  • Very strong metallic bonding from a half-filled 5d shell is what pushes the melting point so high
  • Tungsten carbide, WC, is nearly as hard as corundum and is the workhorse of cutting tools

Quick-fire facts

  • •Atomic number 74; the IUPAC name is tungsten, but German, Spanish and Scandinavian usage keeps wolfram, which is why the symbol is W
  • •Highest melting point (3,422 °C) and highest boiling point (about 5,930 °C) of any element, and the highest tensile strength of any pure metal
  • •Carl Wilhelm Scheele identified tungstic acid in scheelite in 1781; Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar reduced it to the metal in 1783
  • •Density 19.25 g/cm³, within a whisker of gold's 19.3, which is why counterfeit gold bars are sometimes tungsten-cored
  • •Tungsten carbide, patented in Germany in the 1920s as Widia ('wie Diamant', like diamond), scores about 9 on the Mohs scale
  • •Wolframite ((Fe,Mn)WO4) and scheelite (CaWO4) are the main ores; China supplies the large majority of world production
  • •Used in filaments, X-ray tube targets, rocket nozzles, TIG welding electrodes, radiation shielding and kinetic-energy penetrators
  • •It is the heaviest element known to have a biological role, in a handful of archaeal and bacterial enzymes

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources