Seven Elements That Have Changed the World (26 page)

More than an engineering marvel, the Blackbird was a functional tool of war. It quickly began to show its worth on its first operational mission during the Vietnam War. The US military base at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam was under siege by the North Vietnamese army, but the US was unable to find the truck park which was supplying the enemy with troops and ammunition. On 21 March 1968, the Blackbird flew a reconnaissance mission over the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Vietnam. The photographs revealed not only the suspected truck park, but also the placement of heavy artillery surrounding Khe Sanh. A few days later, the US launched air attacks against these targets, and within two weeks the siege had been lifted.

Having proved its worth in Vietnam, the Blackbird was put to use once again in October 1973 when Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, instigating the Yom Kippur War. Israel was caught off guard by the sudden Arab attack and the US, which supported Israel in the conflict, feared that without adequate intelligence Israel could lose more ground. The Soviet Union, which supported the Arab forces, had repositioned its Cosmos satellite to provide information on Israeli troop positions; President Nixon ordered Blackbird to provide similar support to Israel.

The Blackbird flew from New York to the Arab-Israeli border, a distance
of 9,000 kilometres, in a record time of five hours. Twenty-five minutes flying in restricted territory was all that was needed to photograph the battle lines below. By the next morning the images, showing the positions of the Arab forces, were on the desk of the Israeli general staff.

With titanium, the US controlled the skies during the Cold War. In space, too, titanium gave the Americans an advantage: it was used extensively in the Apollo and Mercury space programmes.
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But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union was also using the wonder metal titanium to rule the seas, building a new class of submarine that was smaller, faster and could dive to greater depths.

‘It must have an advanced design: new materials, a new power plant and a new weapons system – it must be superlative,’ said Dr Georgi Sviatov, at the time a junior Soviet naval engineer, of the
K-162
submarine.
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The Soviet Union sought to create a submarine that could pass quickly and undetected through hostile waters to attack the enemy.

The engineers considered steel and aluminium, but the superiority of titanium was clear. The strength-to-weight ratio of a metal is a crucial consideration in the construction of submarine hulls, which must be light so that the submarine is naturally buoyant, but which must also be able to face extreme water pressures. Titanium’s superior ratio would enable Soviet submarines to dive to new depths. In addition, titanium is also corrosion-resistant, forming a thin layer of titanium dioxide on its surface which protects it against the harsh maritime environment. And, unlike iron, titanium is non-magnetic, reducing the likelihood of a submarine being detected and setting off magnetic mines.

As the US had done for the titanium Blackbird, the Soviet Union paid a premium for their high-tech hulls. The first titanium-hulled submarine, the
K-162
, was so expensive that most thought it would have been cheaper to make it out of gold; the submarine came to be known as the ‘golden fish’.
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In 1983, the Soviet Union used titanium once again, this time to build the world’s deepest diving submarine. The 400-foot-long
Komsomolets
, ‘Member of the Young Communist League’, was built with an inner titanium
hull to operate at depths of up to a kilometre. The
Komsomolets
sank in April 1989 in the Norwegian Sea when a high-pressure air line burst and started a fire on board the vessel. The fire quickly spread through the oxygen-enriched air. By fire, flooding and suffocation, forty-two out of the sixty-nine crew died. The broken titanium hull, containing two nuclear reactors and at least two nuclear warheads, now sits a mile under the sea entombed in a concrete sarcophagus to prevent the toxic plutonium inside leaking.

US military intelligence first began to retrieve evidence of the Soviet’s titanium-hulled submarines in the late 1960s. Satellite pictures of a submarine hull in Sudomekh Admiralty Shipyard in Leningrad (St Petersburg) revealed an unusual metal which seemed too reflective to be steel and which was not corroding. In the winter of 1969, Commander William Green, an assistant US naval attaché, was visiting Leningrad when he retrieved a piece of debris as it fell from a truck leaving the Sudomekh yard. It turned out to be titanium. Confirmation came in the mid-1970s when, while searching through scrap metal that had been sent to the US from the Soviet Union, intelligence officers found a piece of titanium inscribed with the number 705. This was known to be the serial number of the Soviet submarine project under surveillance. For a long time the US did not believe the intelligence they were receiving. Titanium seemed far too expensive and difficult to work with on the scale of the mammoth Soviet submarine hulls.

As the Cold War came to a close, the extreme deep-diving capabilities of titanium-hulled submarines were no longer necessary, nor were the Mach 3 speeds of titanium-framed aircraft. In the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, military spending on both sides of the Iron Curtain was cut; this was termed the ‘peace dividend’ by the US President George Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The last of the Project 705 submarines were decommissioned and funding for the Blackbird was removed, ending its life as the only military aeroplane never to be shot down or lose a single crew member to enemy fire.

Today titanium has a limited role. It is used on oil rigs and in refineries where the harsh maritime and chemical environments would quickly
corrode steel; for limb implants where strength and biocompatibility are paramount; and for high-specification ‘external limbs’, such as bicycle frames, golf clubs and tennis rackets.
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Titanium is still important in the aerospace industry, the prime consumer of the metal, where weight savings can significantly reduce fuel consumption.
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But cheaper strong and lightweight aluminium alloys are now competing with it in all but the
most specialist applications. Concorde, that symbol of civilian supersonic flight, was largely constructed from aluminium. Titanium’s reign as a wonder metal was over; it had changed the world but, having done so, had been made superfluous.

But while steel skyscrapers rise out of the ground at an ever-increasing rate, we rarely see titanium used in the structures of modern society. One exception to this is the magnificent titanium-plated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, northern Spain. The futuristic ship-like curves of the exterior were originally chosen to be clad in stainless steel, but architect Frank Gehry was not happy with the appearance. It would be too bright in the sun and too dark in the shade. He considered zinc, lead and copper and, a few days before his proposal for the building was made public, was sent a promotional sampler of titanium. The new material’s reflective properties gave it a velvety sheen in all light conditions. This was the metal Gehry wanted to use, but it was just too expensive.

One day, with titanium in mind, a member of the design team noticed a sudden drop in its price. Russia, the world’s largest titanium manufacturer, had dumped large amounts of the metal on to the market. Within a week, Gehry bought all the titanium he needed before the price rose again. In 1997, the Guggenheim, covered in 33,000 titanium panels, opened to critical acclaim.

Titanium metal will always be in the background, but it will never outmatch iron for its unique cheapness, ubiquity and versatility. Holding back titanium’s widespread use is the dated process by which titanium metal is extracted from its ore. The Kroll process, named after metallurgist William Kroll, that originally unleashed titanium’s potential as a metal in the 1940s, is still the most widely used method of production today. The Kroll process is extremely energy-intensive and so very expensive.
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As a result, titanium is an order of magnitude more expensive than steel and so, except for the most specialist applications, cheap steel is preferred over titanium. When weight is the chief concern, aluminium is usually chosen.

Titanium metal did not find the widespread application in society envisaged in the 1950s and production today is only about one ten-thousandth that of steel. This is all the more surprising considering that titanium is the fourth most abundant structural metal, after aluminium, iron and magnesium.

But titanium in its pure metallic form is only one half of its story. When titanium combines with oxygen atoms, with which it naturally bonds, it becomes titanium dioxide and that is so common in modern society that we rarely realise it is there.

As a Londoner every summer I go to Wimbledon where, before a match begins, I survey the immaculately mown lawns and meticulously drawn white lines of the tennis courts. The players come out of the grandstand, dressed head to toe in white, a tradition that stretches back to the first Lawn Tennis Championship in 1877. Whiteness was a symbol of wealth in the nineteenth century; today, thanks to titanium dioxide, both the courts’ lines and the players’ attire are a brighter shade of white.

We seldom pause to consider that white is everywhere in the world in which we live. In white-walled offices we wear white shirts and work on brilliant-white paper. We eat white foods and we use whitening toothpaste, because we think of whiteness as clean and pure. Adding white colouring to skimmed milk has been shown to make it more palatable.
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In almost every application, whiteness in the products we buy comes from the harmless additive E171, a code name for titanium dioxide. Using titanium dioxide, murky greys and pale yellows are turned to pure white, making life agreeable for the modern consumer.

I first learnt of the use of titanium as a whitening agent when I was Chief Financial Officer of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio) in the late 1980s. Quebec Iron and Titanium (QIT) was a subsidiary, formed in 1948 shortly after the discovery of the world’s largest deposit of ilmenite, a titanium iron oxide mineral, in the beautiful Lake Allard region of Quebec.
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After the iron had been separated out to make steel, we sold the titanium oxide slag to be used as white pigment.

On my yearly visits to QIT, from the air I could see the full scale of the ilmenite deposit, stretching out over an area the size of a hundred American Football fields, against the spectacular backdrop of Lakes Allard and Tio. The growth of the company over the last three decades had been relentless. In the 1950s titanium slag production grew from 2,000 to 230,000 tonnes and iron production from 2,700 to 170,000 tonnes. During the 1960s and 1970s a series of modernisation and expansion programmes was implemented as demand for titanium and steel products increased. Today QIT produces 1.5 million tonnes of titanium dioxide each year. But this causes barely a dent in the estimated global reserves of almost 700 million tonnes. Production can easily be stepped up to meet rising demand and so, unlike iron and oil, there has been little conflict over titanium reserves.

Like steel skyscrapers and silicon chips, manufactured whiteness is all around us, once a symbol of wealth but now a ubiquitous symbol of modern life. But why, of all the colours we could choose, are humans attracted to white? For the answer, we must go back to our understanding of light itself.

In August 1665, Sir Isaac Newton drew the curtains of his study at Woolsthorpe Hall, Lincolnshire, save for a slit through which a sunbeam shone into the room. In the path of the beam he placed a glass prism that, as the light passed through, painted a spectrum on the opposite wall. With characteristic rigour he measured the dispersion of light across the room and from his results produced a revolutionary new theory of colour.
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For 2,000 years, since Aristotle wrote
De Coloribus
, it was believed that all colours were made from varying combinations of black and white, the polar opposites in our perception of colour. According to this theory, the colours of the rainbow were actually added to white light by a prism itself. To disprove this, Newton used an identical prism to show that the spectrum could be recombined into its original pure white state. Newton had
demonstrated that colour was an intrinsic property of white light; he had ‘unwoven the rainbow’.
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Newton divided the spectrum into seven colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – the choice of seven to accord with the seven notes of the diatonic music scale and the seven heavenly spheres. ‘But the most surprising and wonderful composition,’ Newton wrote, ‘was that of Whiteness … ’Tis ever compounded.’
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White light is the master of the rainbow; it is the basis from which all other colours emerge.

Sunlight, as opposed to the circular golden sun itself, is white light and so contains the full rainbow spectrum of colours. The sun emits these different colours of light in different proportions which, when combined, give the perception of white light.
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This is no coincidence: our eyes have evolved over billions of years so that they are adapted to make sunlight the whitest and brightest source of light. We see objects as white when they reflect different colours of light by the same proportions as are emitted from the sun. The colour white is essentially an imitation of sunlight; we paint objects white so that they are bright and outstanding.

In contrast, gold is a reflection of the circular sun in the sky, whose white image is turned golden by the dispersion of light rays in our atmosphere.
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We worship the sun, and so place a high value on gold. But the white light of the sun is so pervasive, like the white walls which surround us, that it goes almost unnoticed.

Since humans first moved into caves, we have sought to create a safe and hospitable environment in which our families and societies can live and develop. We have built barriers between us and the earth, rain and wind, separating ourselves from nature. In keeping walls white, we assert our control over the Earth’s destructive forces, which constantly batter, wear down and soil human constructions. The white interiors of our houses and office blocks create a brilliant glow, competing with that of the sun.