Hungarian advertisement for tungsten-filament light bulbs, c. 1910
8 November 2024
Tungsten is a chemical element with atomic number 74 and the symbol W. It is also known as Wolfram. While it was known through its ores much earlier, chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was the first to identify it as a distinct element in 1781. Tungsten has a wide variety of uses, but the most prominent is as a component in alloys making them harder. It is also used to make the filaments in incandescent light bulbs, but that use is declining with the introduction of LED lighting.
Both names predate Scheele’s identification of the element, being used for the ores in which it is found. The name tungsten is a borrowing from the Swedish, tung (heavy) + sten (stone). It’s first known use in English is in a 1770 translation of Swedish minerologist Axel Fredric Cronstedt’s An Essay Towards a System of Minerology:
Calx of iron, united with another unknown earth, Ferrum calciforme terrâ quâdam incognitâ intimè mixtum. The Tungsten of the Swedes.
Wolfram is recorded in the sixteenth century and is probably from German miners’ jargon wolf (wolf) + rahm (cream, foam). Minerologist Georgius Agricola proffered a reason for this name, saying the ore resembled that of the ore in which white lead could be found, but did not contain that metal, as if a wolf had devoured it. Agricola, writing in Latin, used lupi spumam, the translation of the German term:
Quinetiam niger quidam lapis inuenitur prorsus colore similis illi ex quo coflatur candidum plumbum: sed adeo leuis, ut mox intelligas inanem esse, & in se habere nullum metallum, hunc nostri appellant lupi spumam.
(A certain black stone is found with exactly the same color as that from which white lead is forged: but so light that you soon understand that it is empty, and that it has no metal in it, this is called by us wolf’s foam.)
Wolfram appears in English by 1741, when it is referenced in John Andrew Cramer’s Elements of the Art of Assaying Metals:
There is also, but especially in tin-Mines, a kind of striated Ore, made of Filaments of an irregular Texture, and dark coloured, which, when scraped, appears sometimes of a dark red Colour: it is ponderous enough, and likewise contains Iron, but it is at the same Time very arsenical; on which Account it is always rejected by Metallurgists, as being very prejudicial. The Germans call it Woolfram.
Both tungsten and wolfram were in widespread use in the scientific literature until 1950, when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) made tungsten the standard term. IUPAC, however, retained W as the element’s symbol.
Sources:
Agricola, Georgius. “De natura fossilium.” In Georgii Agricolae, Basil: Froben, 1546, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Cramer, John Andrew. Elements of the Art of Assaying Metals. London: Thomas Woodward and C. Davis, 1741, 139. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Cronstedt, Axel Fredric. An Essay Towards a System of Minerology. Gustav von Engestrom, trans. Emanuel Mendes Da Costa, ed. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1770, 201. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tungsten, n., wolfram, n.
Image credit: Géza Faragó, c. 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.