Among various metals, tungsten is the most difficult to melt and least volatile, hence it is called a "high melting point metal". Its melting point is as high as 3380 degrees and its boiling point is 5927 degrees.

The Latin meaning of tungsten is "white foam from the wolf's mouth". How can tungsten be associated with carnivores? It turned out that a long time ago, when people used ore to refine tin, they found that whenever the ore contained a brown heavy stone, the tin production would sharply decrease. Originally, this heavy stone would devour tin like a wolf devouring a sheep. Therefore, tungsten is called "white foam in the wolf's mouth".

Tungsten accounts for approximately one hundred thousandth of the earth's crust. There are black wolframite (also called wolframite) and yellow gray calcium tungstate (also called scheelite) in nature, and China's tungsten reserves rank first in the world. The Nanling Mountain in China is the area with the richest tungsten deposits in the world, especially in the south of Jiangxi, known as the "metal village". Jiangxi Dayu and Hunan Shizhuyuan have the world's largest tungsten mines.

As early as the 18th century, humans discovered tungsten, but it was not until 1850 that pure metal tungsten was produced by Weiler. However, it has been widely used since then. It is not only used for filaments, but also as a high-performance cutting tool.

In 1864, the British man Machett added 5% tungsten to steel for the first time, refining it into an alloy steel that can maintain high hardness without change. Using this steel as a cutting tool can increase the metal cutting speed from 5 meters per minute to 7.5 meters per minute. Due to the continuous development of high-speed steel with different tungsten contents, the cutting speed has gradually increased. After more than 40 years, tungsten steel knives have increased the metal cutting speed to 35 meters per minute, resulting in a 6-fold increase in cutting capacity.

In 1907, the successful development of an alloy based on tungsten, chromium, and cobalt, the "Stelli" hard alloy, created conditions for achieving higher cutting speeds.

The manufacturer of tungsten insulation screens introduced that modern ultra hard alloys are produced by sintering tungsten carbide and some other elemental carbides. It is made by mixing hard particles of carbides of refractory metals (tungsten, tantalum, titanium, molybdenum, etc.) with powders of one or several iron group elements (cobalt, nickel, or iron), pressing them into shape, and then sintering them.

Hard alloy is currently the strongest alloy in the world. There are two main types of widely used hard alloys nowadays: the first type is tungsten carbide based alloys with cobalt as the binder; The second type is titanium carbide based alloys with tool steel as the binder.

Using hard alloy as a cutting tool, its hardness will not decrease even at a high temperature of 1000 degrees. Therefore, high-speed cutting can be carried out, with a cutting speed of over 2000 meters per minute, which is more than 100 times higher than ordinary carbon steel tools and 15 times higher than tungsten steel tools. The mold made of it can be stamped more than 3 million times, which is 60 times more durable than ordinary alloy steel molds.