All right, everybody settle down. Welcome to the weekly meeting of the National Association Of W Lovers.   Show Notes More to come later, but for now: Portugal was neutral during World War 2, which was a difficult position to maintain. They were afraid that Germany might invade, especially after the fall of Paris, or even that they might be subject to a proxy war via Spain. Portugal also had a huge supply of tungsten, basically a monopoly, and the metal was in high demand at the time -- for basically the same reason that molybdenum was during WWI. That made remaining neutral even harder than it already was, and Portugal wound up selling tungsten to both sides during the war -- the Allies for the good money, and the Axis to try to keep the enemy at the gates, so to speak. Portugal's neutrality wound up playing a major role in the war. At the end of Casablanca, Laszlo and Ilsa go to Lisbon (spoilers). This was the case for plenty of people in real life, too. Lisbon was the last way in or out of Europe. Despite being ruled by an authoritarian (Antonio Salazar) who dealt with the Nazi government, Portugal nonetheless played a key role in helping the Allies. Episode Script The only people who don't love Oliver Sacks are those who are not yet familiar with him. A neurologist, naturalist, historian, and modern-day polymath, Sacks became famous for writing nonfiction books about his most fascinating patients. The Island Of The Colorblind, An Anthropologist On Mars, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat are but a few of his best-selling works. He treated his anonymous subjects not as bizarre curiosities or freakish aberrations, but first and foremost as humans who deserved respect and compassionate care. He was sort of a Sigmund Freud by way of Fred Rogers. A knack for science seems to have run in the family. His grandfather worked with lamps in the 1870s; his mother was a surgeon who loved chemistry; among his nearly one hundred cousins were throngs of teachers, doctors, and mathematicians; and his Uncle Dave worked almost exclusively with element 74. One day, Uncle Dave pulled his nephew aside for a special demonstration: he filled a small bowl with mercury, the metal that's so famously liquid at room temperature. He then dropped a lead bullet into the bowl. Despite the bullet's considerable weight, mercury is more dense, so the bullet floated atop the metal's surface. Intriguing -- but there was one more thing. The part that Michael Caine might call "the prestige." He pulled out a little grey ingot of the metal he loved, his metal, with its unique feel and sound and weight. This, too, he dropped in the bowl of mercury... and it plunged straight to the bottom. Young Oliver had great respect for this metal and even greater respect for his uncle.. Decades later, when Sacks was writing his childhood autobiography, he gave the book the same name he had for Dave: Uncle Tungsten. You’re listening to The Episodic Table Of Elements, and I’m T. R. Appleton. Each episode, we take a look at the fascinating true stories behind one element on the periodic table.1 Today, we're foaming at the mouth for tungsten. Tungsten isn't just a refractory metal -- it's the most refractory metal on Earth. An alloy of tantalum, hafnium, and carbon has the highest melting point of anything we've discovered yet, and carbon actually has a higher melting point too, but among the pure elemental metals,