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If steel is a critical building block of modern industry, tungsten is an essential component of modern steel alloys. Steelmaking has an ancient history, but making steel harder by adding tungsten is a commercial process barely a century old. Introducing the evolving technologies and industries that led to tungsten’s economic development provides historical context, and helps explain how and why one modest Nevada mining company rose to national prominence in the years between two world wars. EARLY DISCOVERIES AND EXPERIMENTS Tungsten was discovered late in the history of civilization, and even then it took another 150 years before it became commercially valuable. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond wisely cautions us to beware of simplistic explanations for inventions that ultimately change the world. Necessity may or may not be the mother of invention, but clearly tungsten required both an advanced technology and an industrial necessity before its properties could be understood and utilized. Long before primates evolved and began using tools, tectonic movements in the earth’s crust folded, fractured, and sometimes exposed on the surface hydrothermal veins of wolframite, the “black ore” of tungsten, along with minerals containing silica, gold, silver, tin, copper, molybdenum, and iron with which tungsten is often associated. Other deposits of wolframite and its “white ore” cousin, scheelite, could be found in the metamorphic contact zones in and around granitic intrusions (the so-called skarn ores), in low-grade “stockworks” containing thousands of tiny veins and veinlets, in sedimentary formations, and even in the solutions of brine lakes and hot springs. Where deposits cropped out on the surface, the corrosive effects of oxygen, the weathering effects of wind, water, and ice, and the pulling effects of gravity altered, eroded, fractured, washed, and carried minerals, along with gravel, sand, clay, and silt, far from their sources. Unlike other less STEEL ALLOYS AND THE RISE OF MODERN INDUSTRY 1 2 T U N G S T E N I N P E A C E A N D W A R widely diffused elements that went into ferrous alloys such as molybdenum, manganese, and vanadium, tungsten can be found in some thirty-seven countries around the globe, mostly in shallow, low-grade deposits.1 Probably the first humans to encounter tungsten were Neolithic placer miners and metalworkers looking for pliable pieces of native copper or gold. From streambeds or dry washes they may have picked up rounded “nuggets” of wolframite or scheelite, but tossed them back when heating or hammering failed to yield their secrets. There they lay for the next ten thousand years or so, unusable and therefore uninteresting until civilization crossed the intellectual threshold that separated the medieval and modern worlds. Isolating and identifying the heavy gray metal were tributes to empirical observation and experiment, a crescendo in the symphony of science and reason we call the Enlightenment. A century after Newton and Galileo, natural philosophy—a premodern term for the physical sciences—was a popular and influential intellectual endeavor in Europe among the educated elite, rich or poor, amateur or professional. Academic institutions across the continent expanded their curricular offerings in chemistry, astronomy, physics, and other disciplines. By the mid-eighteenth century Sweden had a thriving scientific community . In 1747 Johan Gottschalk Wallerius, a professor of mineralogy at the University of Uppsala, studied the properties of a black mineral that generated a muddy froth in the process of smelting tin ore. Two hundred years earlier the German physician and scientist Georg Bauer, better known as Agricola, in a technical paper published prior to his famous treatise on metals, De Re Metallica , had termed it spuma lupi, perhaps because of its tendency to hide or “eat up” cassiterite to the consternation of smelter workers. Wallerius translated Bauer’s term into German. He thought volf rahm was an ore of tin, but was unable to reduce it.2 In the 1770s and ’80s at the same school, Professor Torbern Olof Bergman experimented, lectured, and wrote on the properties of metallic compounds, influencing generations of scholars and students. His chemical analysis of iron provided the first scientific distinction between iron and steel. One of his students, Karl Wilhelm Scheele, an impoverished pharmacist with a modest pension from the Stockholm Academy of Science, studied the reduction of metals and other substances, working after hours with a few simple laboratory instruments. Over a lifetime of experimentation Scheele discovered more new chemical compounds than perhaps any other scientist before or since. In [52.15.59.163] Project...

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