"Well, it would hardly be right to say that any one individual invented them, for they were really a development of science worked out by many men, who studied the problem for many years. This caused a number of very bitter lawsuits over the patents and brought about the imprisonment of one United States patent office official who was convicted of falsifying the records at Washington to help one of the inventors. This inventor was John Allen Heany, and his patents were rejected finally, the rights of the tungsten filament going to the General Electric Company. The name 'tungsten' is taken from the material of which filament, or the little wire which lights up in the globe, is made." "What is tungsten?" asked the boy. "Tungsten is a metal that for a great many years some of our most prominent chemists and scientific investigators declared could not be put to the use we see it here," answered the man. Noticing that the boy leaned forward in his chair, keen on his every word, the boy's friend continued his description of this strange metal that has been put to work lighting us in our march along the road of life. He explained that tungsten, or wolfram, was discovered in 1781 and was named from the Swedish words "tung" (heavy) and "sten" (stone). The mineral is not found in a pure state but rather in wolframite, which is what the scientists call a tungstate of iron and manganese, and also in schoolite which is calcium tungstate. Pure tungsten is bright steel gray, very hard, and very heavy. It is one of the most brittle of all the metals and for that reason was put to very few uses before the invention of the tungsten lamp. It was most commonly used, however, in various steel processes, to harden the metal. From the time Edison invented the incandescent lamp in 1879, right up to the present electricians have tried to get a better electric light filament. A number of persons conceived the idea of making a filament of tungsten on account of its peculiar characteristics, which seemed to be just about the ones needed for the ideal electric light globe.