Seven Elements That Have Changed the World by John Browne

Author:John Browne [Browne, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Books

TITANIUM

In October 1950, Popular Science magazine featured a ‘new rival’ that ‘challenges aluminum and steel as a structural material for airplanes and rockets, guns and armor’. Strong, lightweight and corrosion resistant, titanium was presented as the wonder metal of the future.1

Titanium was discovered in 1791 by William Gregor, an English clergyman, mineralogist and chemist, when he isolated some ‘black sand’ from a river in the Manaccan valley in Cornwall. We now know this as the mineral ilmenite, an iron-titanium oxide, from which he produced an impure oxide of a new element that he called manaccanite. Four years later, Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, isolated titanium dioxide from titanium’s other major ore, rutile. He called the new element titanium, after the gods of Greek mythology the Titans, who were imprisoned inside the Earth by their father, Uranus. Klaproth also discovered uranium; he chose abstract names for both elements as, at the time, their properties were not fully known.2 Yet, coincidentally, Klaproth’s name turned out to be apt: like the Titans, trapped inside the Earth, titanium is strongly bound in its ore and is very difficult to extract.

It was not until 1910 that the metallurgist Matthew Albert Hunter, working at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside New York, created a sample of pure metallic titanium. In doing so he revealed titanium’s remarkable physical properties. It took until the 1940s, 150 years after titanium’s original discovery, to develop a commercial process to extract titanium from its ore.

Now, as tensions mounted at the start of the Cold War, each side, the US and the Soviet Union, was desperate to establish a technological advantage that would give it superiority in the seas, skies and outer space. Titanium seemed a new miracle metal that could do just that. The First and Second World Wars were fought with iron and carbon; the Cold War would be fought with titanium and uranium.

Titanium made possible the most extreme of Cold War engineering, such as the supersonic spy plane the Lockheed Blackbird. Flying at three times the speed of sound, Blackbird aircraft could outrun the most advanced Soviet missile technology, bringing vital military intelligence back to US soil within hours. The Blackbird is an awe-inspiring work of engineering and is still the fastest air-breathing manned jet in the world.3

Supersonic Blackbird

‘We’ll fly at [27,000 metres] and jack up the speed to Mach 3 . . . The higher and faster we fly the harder it will be to spot us, much less stop us,’ explained Kelly Johnson, Vice-President of Advanced Development Projects at Lockheed aerospace company, to a group of engineers.4

In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the US was desperate to know about Soviet military capabilities. Proposed satellite technology had severe limitations: orbits were fixed and too predictable for their paths to go unnoticed, while images taken from outer space were often blurred.

Kelly Johnson believed his spy plane was the only way to gather adequate military intelligence and also ensure the safety of the pilots onboard. The first

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