Titanium

Titanium was first recognised in 1791 by the English clergyman and mineralogist William Gregor, who noticed a new metal in a black sand from Cornwall. It was independently found and, in 1795, named by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who called it titanium after the Titans of Greek mythology. Extremely difficult to obtain pure, it was not produced in quantity until the twentieth century. Titanium is prized for combining the strength of steel with roughly half its weight and near-total corrosion resistance. Abundant in the crust yet costly to refine, it is used where strength-to-weight and resistance to seawater and body fluids matter most, in aircraft, spacecraft, ships and surgical implants, while its brilliant white oxide is the world's most important white pigment.

Gregor found his black sand in the Manaccan valley of Cornwall and called the mineral menachanite after the parish; Klaproth, working independently in Germany with the mineral rutile from Hungary a few years later, recognised the same new metal and supplied the name that stuck, though credit for the original discovery is generally given to Gregor. Titanium's industrial history had to wait nearly a century and a half longer: not until the Luxembourg-born metallurgist William Kroll developed a practical reduction process in the 1940s, now called the Kroll process, could the metal be produced in useful quantity, since its great affinity for oxygen and nitrogen makes it unusually difficult to purify.

Klaproth deliberately reached for myth, naming the element after the Titans, the elder race of Greek gods, children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth), who ruled before the Olympians overthrew them. He had already named uranium after the newly discovered planet Uranus, and chose the Titans in the same spirit of grand, cosmic nomenclature rather than for any specific property. The name proved apt in hindsight: titanium's exceptional strength and its role in aircraft, spacecraft, ships and implants give it a fittingly titanic reputation. The association is one of pure naming, a nineteenth-century chemist borrowing the grandeur of Greek myth for a metal whose real powers were not yet known.

Titanium dioxide's white pigment, titanium white, gradually replaced the traditional lead white used by painters for centuries, offering superior opacity without lead's severe toxicity, a changeover largely complete by the mid twentieth century that altered both the health of artists and the chemistry of the paint tube. The same compound's ability to scatter and absorb ultraviolet light makes it a common active ingredient in mineral sunscreens, so a metal named for the primordial Titans now shields human skin from the Sun in a far more literal sense than its mythic namesake ever implied.