Titanium · element 22
As strong as steel at little more than half the weight, and so tolerant of the body that surgeons screw it into bone
Key facts
Titanium is the metal of hip replacements, jet engines, racing bikes and the white in almost every tin of paint. It combines strength with lightness and shrugs off seawater and body fluids, thanks to a thin, tough oxide skin that forms the instant it meets air.
It is not rare. Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the crust and there is more of it than copper, zinc, lead and tin combined. What makes titanium expensive is not finding it but freeing it from oxygen, which it grips with unusual tenacity.
Where it is found
Titanium never occurs as a metal in nature. Its main minerals are ilmenite, an iron titanium oxide, and rutile, which is titanium dioxide. Both are dense and resistant to weathering, so they concentrate in black sands on beaches and along ancient shorelines. Australia, South Africa, Canada, China, Mozambique and Norway are major producers. Most rocks, soils and clays contain titanium at low levels, and it turns up in living things in traces without any known biological role.
Titanium is also a significant part of the dark basalt plains on the Moon, and it appears in meteorites. Fine needles of rutile inside corundum are what create the six-pointed star in star sapphires and star rubies.
How it was discovered
William Gregor, a Cornish clergyman and amateur mineralogist, examined black sand from a stream in the Manaccan valley in 1791 and found it contained the oxide of an unknown metal, which he called manaccanite. Four years later the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth independently identified the same element in rutile from Hungary and named it titanium after the Titans of Greek mythology. Neither produced the metal. Pure titanium was first made in 1910 by Matthew Hunter, and a workable industrial method, the Kroll process, which uses magnesium to strip chlorine from titanium tetrachloride, arrived in the 1940s. That slow, energy-hungry process is still the main route today.
What we use it for
More than nine tenths of mined titanium never becomes metal. It is turned into titanium dioxide, a brilliant white pigment that scatters light better than almost any other cheap material. It whitens paint, paper, plastics, toothpaste, sunscreen and sweets. The metal, usually alloyed with aluminium and vanadium, goes into aircraft frames and landing gear, jet engine compressor blades, submarine hulls, chemical plant, and desalination equipment where seawater would destroy steel.
Because bone grows onto it and the body does not reject it, titanium is used for hip and knee replacements, dental implants, pacemaker cases and surgical screws and plates. Consumers meet it in watches, spectacle frames, golf clubs and camping cookware. Titanium tetrachloride, which fumes in damp air, is used for smoke screens.
Reading the numbers
Titanium melts at about 1668 °C and boils at about 3287 °C, both higher than iron, so it must be melted under vacuum or inert gas to stop it reacting with the air. Its density of 4.506 g/cm³ is about 57 per cent of iron's, which is the root of its strength-to-weight advantage. The configuration [Ar] 3d2 4s2 gives it four outer electrons, and titanium usually uses all four, forming Ti4+ compounds such as titanium dioxide. Its first four ionisation energies climb steadily and then leap to over 9500 kJ per mole for the fifth, which explains why +4 is the ceiling. Lower states exist: titanium(III) compounds are violet and titanium(II) is a strong reducing agent. Titanium heads group 4 in the d-block, above zirconium and hafnium, which share its +4 chemistry and its stubborn resistance to corrosion.
Safety and the environment
Titanium metal is one of the least toxic and most biocompatible metals known, and titanium dioxide is generally regarded as safe in paint and cosmetics. Two cautions apply. Fine titanium powder and machining swarf can burn fiercely and are hard to extinguish. And inhaled titanium dioxide nanoparticles are under scrutiny; the European Union withdrew approval for titanium dioxide as a food additive in 2022 because safety could not be confirmed. Producing the metal uses a great deal of energy, which is its main environmental cost, and researchers are working on cheaper, cleaner ways to extract it.
Did you know?
- Klaproth named titanium after the Titans of Greek myth; he had named uranium after the planet Uranus a few years earlier.
- The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane was built largely from titanium because aluminium would have softened at the temperatures reached in flight.
- Titanium is one of very few metals that will burn in pure nitrogen, which is why it has to be melted under argon rather than nitrogen.
- Some lunar basalts brought back by the Apollo missions contain far more titanium than typical rocks on Earth.
- Bone cells attach directly to titanium's oxide surface, a process called osseointegration, which is why dental implants are made from it.
- Titanium dioxide is so good at scattering light that it is the standard white pigment in paints, papers and plastics worldwide.
More in the transition metals
Column-mates come first, since elements in one column have outer electrons arranged in a similar way and tend to behave alike; the rest are the nearest neighbours in the family.
See all 38 transition metals on one page, or browse all 118 elements.
Compare Titanium with another element
Each comparison has a side-by-side data table and a plain-English summary of the differences.
Frequently asked questions
Is titanium stronger than steel?
Weight for weight, yes. Titanium alloys are about as strong as many steels but only around 57 per cent as dense, so a titanium part can be much lighter for the same strength. Pure titanium is softer than hardened steel, so the alloys matter.
Why is titanium so expensive?
The ore is cheap and plentiful, but titanium bonds so strongly to oxygen that extracting the metal takes several energy-hungry steps involving chlorine and magnesium. Melting and machining it also require special care, which adds cost.
Is titanium magnetic?
No. Titanium is weakly paramagnetic, meaning it is barely attracted to a magnet at all, and it will not stick to one. This is one reason it is safe in MRI scanners.
Is titanium safe inside the body?
Yes. Its oxide surface is chemically inert, it does not corrode in body fluids, and bone bonds to it, so it is used for hip and knee joints, dental implants and plates that stay in the body for decades.
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Written by Anthony. Updated September 2026. Numerical data from Periodic-Table-JSON (CC BY-SA), cross-checked against the Titanium reference article. Spotted an error? Tell us.