1. Reverend William Gregor (1762 -- 1817) : In 1791, titanium was discovered in the form of a titanium-bearing mineral in Cornwall, England, by Reverend William Gregor, an amateur mineralogist who was then vicar of the parish of Creed in Cornwall. He found some black sand near a stream in the neighboring parish of Manaccan, and when he discovered that the sand was attracted to magnets, he realized that the mineral (ilmenite) contained a new element. The analysis revealed that the sand contained two metal oxides: iron oxide (the reason the sand was attracted to magnets) and a white metal oxide that he could not identify. Realizing that the unidentified oxide contained an undiscovered metal, Gregor reported his findings to the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall and to the German journal Chemical Annual. Around the same time, Franz-Joseph Muller von Reichenstein made a similar substance, but was unable to identify it.
2. Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817) : In 1795, the German chemist Klaproth also found this oxide when analyzing red rutile produced in Hungary. He advocated using the name Titanium for uranium (discovered by Klapprote in 1789), referring to the Titanic of Greek mythology. The Chinese name is titanium according to its translated sound. When he heard about Gregor's earlier findings, Klapprot took samples of Manacan minerals and confirmed that they contained titanium.
3. Matthew A. Hunter: The titanium discovered by Gregor and Klapprot was titanium dioxide in powder form, not titanium metal. Because the oxide of titanium is extremely stable, and titanium metal can combine with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and other direct and intense, so it is difficult to produce titanium. It was not until 1910 that American chemist Hunter first used sodium to reduce TiCl4 to produce 99.9% pure titanium metal.