Tungsten is a rare metal with a reputation for being one of the toughest elements. It’s an extremely stable and durable material, boasting one of the highest melting points, densities, and corrosion resistance levels of all refractory metals.
For those who don’t know much about tungsten, however, there is a prevailing mystery – there’s no ‘W’ to be found in ‘tungsten’, so why is its symbol on the periodic table a W?
The truth behind the W is that the element actually has more than one name, and this representative letter doesn’t come from the name ‘tungsten’ – it comes from the name ‘wolfram’.
If you’re left wondering where either of these names came from, and why the element is represented by a W despite its common name being tungsten, keep reading to find out.
The history of tungsten
Over two hundred years ago, two brothers in Spain found an acid in the mineral wolframite which they reduced to an elemental metal using charcoal. Fausto and Juan Jose D’Elhuyar were therefore credited with the discovery of tungsten metal in 1783.
Their successful isolation of tungsten built upon the research of other scientists before them:
- Peter Woulfe, an Irish chemist who realised that a mineral from Sweden contained a new metal in 1779.
- Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a German-Swedish chemist who separated an acidic metal oxide from this mineral in 1781.
As the first to obtain what we now know as tungsten as a pure element, the D’Elhuyar brothers decided to call it wolfram, after the mineral it was extracted from.
The Germanic name for this mineral in turn comes from wolframite’s ability to disrupt the smelting of tin – the tungsten ore in the mineral was said to ‘devour’ the tin like a wolf.
So, if this metal was called wolfram first, where does tungsten come in?
The confusion starts with scheelite, another mineral containing tungsten ore which was itself known as tungsten in old Swedish (meaning ‘heavy stone’). To distinguish the pure element tungsten from scheelite/calcium tungstate in Swedish, it was referred to as wolfram throughout most of Europe.
When Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius devised methods for measuring atomic weights and using letters to represent the elements, he therefore chose W to represent wolfram – and his work later became the basis for Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements.
Wolfram vs tungsten
While wolfram was the predominant name throughout Germanic, Slavic, and Nordic countries, English, French, and American scientists (among others) decided to go with the name tungsten – though the symbol W was accepted for the element across the board.
The controversy between the two names was later fuelled by IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), an international federation formed in 1919 to develop and standardise terminology in the chemical sciences.
As an authority on nomenclature in this area, IUPAC originally accepted wolfram as the element’s official name – then allowed tungsten as an alternative under the influence of the American press.
Several decades later, in 2005, IUPAC completely removed wolfram from their book of standards. In an attempt to achieve international consistency (making the periodic table the same in every country), they chose tungsten as the one and only name for the metal.
The switch to solely referring to the element as tungsten was fairly recent for some countries, but the metal is widely known as tungsten only by now. Some people may still prefer to call it wolfram, but it’s seen as outdated and not professionally accepted.So, if you’re looking to use tungsten parts and fittings for a project of any kind, be sure to look for tungsten specifically – not wolfram!
