Tungsten (W)
“The hardest-melting metal of all — 3422 °C — it glowed in every old light bulb and still bites through steel as tungsten carbide.”
How its electrons are arranged
Computed from the aufbau principle, with known real-world exceptions applied automatically.
The notes
Characteristics
- Electron configuration [Xe] 4f¹⁴ 5d⁴ 6s² — period 6, group 6, d-block, six valence electrons; curiously, tungsten obeys plain Aufbau filling, unlike chromium and molybdenum above it, which promote an electron to gain half-filled s¹d⁵ shells.
- Record melting point of any metal: 3422 °C — and among all the elements only carbon, which sublimes instead of melting, is more heat-proof; the vapour pressure of hot tungsten is the lowest of any metal.
- Density 19.25 g/cm³ — within a whisker of gold’s 19.3, though a tungsten bar costs a fraction as much and is far harder.
- Pure tungsten is hard but brittle at room temperature; its saving grace is that at white heat, where other metals sag, it keeps its strength — the exact virtue a filament needs.
A steel-grey, very hard, brittle metal of astonishing heft — density 19.25 g/cm³, practically the same as gold. Drawn into fine wire it can be coiled, and heated white-hot it holds its shape where every other metal would long since melted into a puddle.
Where you meet it
✦ Uses
- Incandescent light-bulb filaments — still stocked in every hardware shop — glowing at 2500–3000 °C, plus heating elements in ovens and kilns.
- Non-melting electrodes for TIG (argon-arc) welding, where the electrode must carry a blazing arc without ever dripping.
- Tungsten carbide (WC) tool tips: the drill bits chewing concrete and steel on construction sites, lathe cutting inserts, masonry nails — and the rolling ball in many a ballpoint pen.
- The spinning target anodes of hospital X-ray tubes, plus dense counterweights and armour-piercing penetrators where lead-grade density must survive violent shock.
◍ Everyday examples
- Any hardware shop still stocks filament bulbs, and the coiled wire glowing inside each one is tungsten.
- The drill biting concrete at a Dhaka high-rise site almost certainly runs on a tungsten-carbide tip; many ballpoints roll on a carbide ball too.
- Every X-ray picture from a hospital is born when electrons slam into a tungsten target inside the tube.
History & name
In 1781 Carl Wilhelm Scheele dissolved the Swedish miners’ “tung sten” (heavy stone — the mineral now called scheelite, CaWO₄) and proved it hid a new acid, guessing a new metal lay within. Two years later, in 1783, the Basque brothers Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar heated wolframite with charcoal at Bergara in Spain and pulled out the metal itself. English kept the Swedish name “tungsten”, while the symbol W honours the German Wolfram — “wolf’s froth” — because wolframite devoured tin during smelting like a wolf at the trough, leaving only worthless froth behind.