Τιτάν

In 1791, an English clergyman and amateur mineralogist named William Gregor found an unidentified metal in a dark sand near Manaccan in Cornwall. He called it manaccanite after the parish. Four years later, the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth independently discovered the same element in a Hungarian mineral called rutile. Klaproth ignored Gregor's name and called it titanium, after the Titans — the primordial gods of Greek mythology who preceded the Olympians.

Klaproth had a pattern. He had already named uranium after the planet Uranus in 1789. Now he named titanium after the Titans — not because the metal had proven its strength (nobody had isolated it yet), but because Klaproth believed new elements deserved mythological weight. The Titans were the first generation of gods, born of Earth and Sky, who ruled before Zeus overthrew them. They represented raw, elemental power. The name was aspirational.

The aspiration turned out to be prophetic. Titanium is as strong as steel but 45 percent lighter. It resists corrosion from seawater, chlorine, and most acids. It does not trigger immune rejection in the human body. But isolating pure titanium proved brutally difficult — it took until 1910 for Matthew Hunter to produce pure metallic titanium, and until the 1940s for William Kroll to develop a commercially viable extraction process.

Today titanium is in jet engines, spacecraft, submarines, surgical implants, and hip replacements. The SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest airplane ever built, was 93 percent titanium. During the Cold War, the CIA secretly purchased Soviet titanium to build it — the plane designed to spy on the Soviet Union was made from Soviet metal. A Cornish clergyman's curiosity, a German chemist's mythological ambition, and an element that lived up to its name.