Tungsten Essential Question

Tungsten Essential Question

In 1556 a man named Georgius Agricola founded the element today known as wolframite. Later in 1664, a chemist named Johann Gottlieb Lehmann was studying the element wolframite in his lab and in one of his experiments he fused the mineral with sodium nitrate and ore. The element dissolved in water forming a green solution which began to turn red. He then added the mineral acid, hydrochloric acid, which after some time precipitated a spongy white substance and soon turned yellow after some time. Lehmann reported that the mixture of those mineral resulted in the yellow color because he had mixed iron and zinc. A couple of years later in 1779, Peter Woulfe was studying Lehmann’s work and he decided to infuse it with salt and he too found that it resulted in salt which meant he might have came across a new element. Three years later the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele examined the white mineral and he named it Tungsten and proved that because of the salt, it had formed the new acid. That same year the chemist Torbern Bergman also analyzed the mineral and concluded that the tungsten acid was an oxide of a new element called Lapis ponderosus, but after some time, many preferred the name Tungsten. Two years later in 1783, two Spanish chemists named Juan Jose and Fausto examined the element wolframite and found it also contained the new element Tungsten. They produced a new metal by taking out a little bit of the acid. The new metal they created was named Wolfram or also known as Tungsten. The notice of their new discovery was famous and they became the first to “find” the element Tungsten. The chemist’s technique is still today the primary method for producing the metal. The origin of the name Tungsten, also known as Wolfram, is translated from the Scandinavian language meaning “heavy stone”. Tungsten is found in many mining deposits around the world in Portugal, Russia, Bolivia,