Which metal has the highest melting point?

Tungsten, at 3,422 degrees Celsius - higher than any other metal and higher than every element except carbon, which does not melt at ordinary pressure so much as sublime. That is why tungsten was the filament in every incandescent bulb: it can be run white hot for hundreds of hours without vaporising.

It is also extraordinarily dense, close to gold and to uranium, which has given it two uses at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. It makes excellent kinetic penetrators for anti-tank rounds - a non-radioactive alternative to depleted uranium - and it is the standard material for counterfeiting gold bars, because a tungsten core plated in gold has almost the right weight and the right feel.

The name is a small scandal in chemistry. Its symbol is W, from wolfram, the name used across most of Europe and derived from a German miners' term for a mineral that ruined their tin yields - roughly wolf's froth, because it devoured the tin like a wolf. English took tungsten from Swedish for heavy stone, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry recognised wolfram as the official name until 2005, when it dropped it - to the considerable irritation of Spanish and German chemists.