Word: tungsten
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Meanwhile tea. anise, antimony, Perilla oil and galangal root, all imported from the Orient, rose in price. So did tungsten. Some 60% of this rare, whitish-grey metal comes from China. Technically known as wolfram, tungsten has a higher melting point than any other known metal (6,000° F.), is used in electric lamp filaments, radio tubes and high-speed tool steel...
...price of tungsten was $2.50 a ton. Last year it rose to $7. Fortnight ago it rocketed to $25. Last week the metal market was alarmed over a possible shortage, for China declared that she would withhold her tungsten from world markets as long as the war continues. Prices of high-speed tools at once rose...
...like, is known in trade as "moly." Little use was found for the metal until the end of the 19th Century, when it was tried as an alloy for tool steels. Sulphur in the moly compounds then available un did what good the metal contributed, with the result that tungsten became the stand ard steel hardener. Not until the War, when it was employed in guns, motors, light armor plate, did moly impress steel makers...
...pitchblende. One ton of that mother ore was reduced to extract a half gram of protoactinium oxide. In a phosgene chlorinating bath this was transposed to a chloride. Using the method evolved by General Electric's famed Irving Langmuir. Dr. von Grosse spread the chloride on a tungsten filament in a vacuum, heated the filament, boiled off the chlorine, obtained his bit of pure protoactinium...
Last month Dr. von Grosse asked to have the world supply of protoactinium back for a while so that he could make more photographs. He took it into a darkroom illuminated only by the red glow of a photographic lantern, arranged his microscope and camera. In shaping the tungsten thread to which the protoactinium clung, he was a little too rough. The delicate element crumbled to invisible dust...