1791-1910: Titanium - The book of science

Titanium
Atomic number 22
Places
Commentary

Creed, Berlin, Stockholm, Troy—William Gregor, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Matthew Hunter elements

Titanium

Gregor found a black sand in a streambed
attracted by a magnet, which was ilmenite,
a titanium-iron oxide mineral, in 1791.
Klaproth tested rutile or red schörl,
a titanium dioxide mineral,
and named the element after the Greek Titans, in 1795.
Titanium was difficult to separate,
but Berzelius managed to create
impure titanium metal, in 1825.
Hunter was the first to purify titanium
melting titanium chloride with metallic sodium
under high pressure in a steel cylinder, in 1910.

Atomic number 22

Corrosion resistant, fatigue resistant,
crack resistant, creep resistant,
non-toxic and osseointegratable.
*
Strong and light metal alloys.
A permanent white pigment.
An ingredient in sunscreens.
*
Each Boeing 747 has 45 metric tons of titanium.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is clad with titanium.
Hip joint implants use titanium.
*
Titanium powder or shavings can burn or explode.
Burning titanium cannot be extinguished
by water or carbon dioxide.

Places

William Gregor found titanium in the mineral ilmenite
from the Manaccan valley, thirty miles south of his home
at Creed, a hamlet in Cornwall, England.
Matthew Hunter taught and worked
at Troy, New York, the home
of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Is it a myth that particular things have to happen
in the places where they happen?
Wine, cheese, and people retain
the feel of their origins.
Salmon return somehow to the streams
where they were hatched.
When a country wins a war, its people
feel that conquest is a natural consequence
of their superiority.

The Hunter process for producing titanium is inefficient non-scalable, so production of titanium was confined to the laboratory until William Justin Kroll, in 1940, invented a more complex but scalable process.

For each element, I have tried to establish a place or region where the discovery was made, or, for the prehistorical elements, where earliest evidence of the element has been found. For me, the place is like the terroir of a good wine. But it is sad to see how those early origins have been lost.