This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Titanium was identified twice by two men who never met and did not know of each other's work. In 1791 the Cornish clergyman and amateur mineralogist William Gregor was studying a black sand from a streambed in Manaccan, Cornwall, and found it contained the oxide of a metal nobody had described before; he called it manaccanite, after the parish. Four years later, working independently in Berlin, the chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth found the same element's oxide in a Hungarian mineral, rutile, and, unaware of Gregor's prior identification, gave it the name that stuck: titanium, after the Titans of Greek mythology.
Neither Gregor nor Klaproth ever held a piece of pure titanium metal. Titanium bonds so tightly to oxygen and nitrogen that separating it from its ore defeated chemists for more than a century after its identification. The first person to produce it in a reasonably pure form was the American chemist Matthew A. Hunter, who reduced titanium tetrachloride with sodium metal in a sealed steel vessel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1910, in a batch process too small and too expensive for anything beyond a laboratory curiosity.
The metal did not become an industrial material until 1932, when the Luxembourgish chemist William Justin Kroll worked out a process that reduced titanium tetrachloride with calcium. Eight years later, in 1940, Kroll refined the method further, this time with magnesium, in what became known as the Kroll process. The process was efficient enough to scale, and, refined further over the following decades, it remains the dominant commercial method for producing titanium metal today, still separated from its ore by essentially the same chemistry Kroll worked out nearly a century ago, on an element two men had identified, by two different routes, more than a century before that.