the.com/tungsten
the metal that laughs at fire, melting only when stars would blush.
means A dense, silver-gray metallic element with the highest melting point of any metal, prized for filaments, drill bits, and anything that must endure extreme heat.
from From Swedish 'tung sten,' literally 'heavy stone' — a plain Scandinavian name for a plainly weighty rock. Curiously, the element's chemical symbol W comes from a different name entirely: 'wolfram,' from the German for the mineral wolframite, possibly 'wolf's froth' or 'wolf's soot,' reflecting an old miner's grudge that the ore 'devoured' tin during smelting like a wolf eats sheep. So the metal carries two names from two tongues: the heavy stone of the Swedes, and the wolf of the Germans.
- melting point
- 3422°C, highest of any pure metal
- name origin
- Swedish for heavy stone
- symbol W
- from wolfram, ate other ores like wolves
- light history
- glowed inside every incandescent bulb filament
- density
- nearly as heavy as gold
lightbulb filament — thomas edison's 1910 improvement used tungsten coils that lasted 1,000+ hours versus carbon's 20 hours
tool steel in drills — tungsten carbide drill bits can cut through materials at 10x the speed of steel bits
military armor piercing rounds — us military adopted tungsten-core ammunition in the 1980s to penetrate armored vehicles without depleted uranium