Titanium is a fascinating metal. You can't refine it in anything close to the manner you refine every other metal. It oxidizes hundreds of degrees lower than the melting point (and Titanium Oxide is a brilliant white powder that makes paint so much brighter). Likewise, you can't try to melt it in a nitrogen-only environment because that too turns it all into TiN (a hard gold-colored ceramic material used to coat metal). It is one of those very complicated refining processes that give this electrical engineer headaches trying to follow the chemical reactions.

So if you every have one of those thought experiments about traveling back in time and "inventing" steel (or gunpowder or penicillin or overthrowing the Roman Empire) hundreds of years earlier, forget about titanium because commercial scaled production couldn't happen until the 20th Century.

0 - https://www.titaniumprocessingcenter.com/titanium-history-de...

Totally, aluminum is similar