Titanium in the Aircraft Industry: Proceedings of a Conference Organized by Imperial Chemical Industries Limited and Held in London on February 15, 1957

TITANIUM is a new metal but not a rare one. It is new in the sense that although its existence has been known since 1791, it is only within the last decade that it has become a product of metallurgical industry. It was not until 1925 that it was made by van Arkel, on a small experimental scale, in a state of sufficient purity for an assessment to be made of its properties and of its potential value as an engineering material. So far, it has not been possible to translate into a large scale and economically attractive extraction process the van Arkel technique and it was, in fact, left to W. J. Kroll to devise the first industrial process for the production of ductile titanium, which he described in 1940.