How commercial titanium and zirconium were born

Abstract An appreciation of the advances in titanium production processes, based on historical data, is presented in Table I. As seen therefrom each investigator built up his work on that of his predecessors and the contribution of each seems rather small. The struggle for sodium-reduced metal is typical of this. Nilson and Petterson introduced the bomb method but they borrowed it from the current practice of reducing metal halides and oxides with alkali metals in a bolted gun barrel. Hunter just copied the Nilson-Petterson process and he was somewhat more successful. Good malleability of the titanium obtained was later achieved with this method by Lely and Hamburger. Pressureless sodium reduction was already used by Billy, before Freudenberg operated with this proposition on a large scale. It is up to the reader to judge my own contribution on the basis of the previous art given in Table I.