"In 1941 virtually no metallurgist in the U.S. had seen a piece of ductile titanium..."
First International Titanium Conference, 1968
Reverend William Gregor discovered titanium as a metal oxide in 1791. Isolating pure titanium proved a herculean task, first done 100 years after its oxide was found. Matthew Hunter of Rensselaer Polytechnic University in the United States accomplished the task, netting miniscule quantities of the metal.
Titanium was recognized as strong, light, and resistant to corrosion. The applications for such a metal were nearly infinite, but there was no way to extract large amounts of it. Then, in the early 1930s, metallurgist William Kroll (1889-1973), while working for the German company Siemens & Halske in his native Luxemburg, developed a multi-step process capable to producing the metal in large quantities.
The rise of the Nazi party drove Kroll from Luxemburg to the United States, working for the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and the United States seized control of Siemens & Halske's 1938 German patent rights to the so called "Kroll process" under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Kroll retained his rights, secured a U.S. patent in 1940, and continued his work on titanium. It was soon widely used in military and space programs.
Using a modified Kroll process, DuPont made bulk quantities of titanium available in 1948 and soon titanium became popular with the aerospace, motor, and marine industries. Being one of the toughest metals, titanium was easy to find uses for.
