William Gregor (25 December 1761 - 11 June 1817) was the English clergyman and mineralogist who discovered the elemental metal titanium.
He was born in Trewarthenick, Cornwall, England, the son of Francis Gregor and Mary Copley. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School, where he became interested in chemistry, then after two years with a private tutor entered St John's College, Cambridge from where he graduated in 1784. After gaining an MA he moved to Diptford in Devon where his father had bought him the living. He married Charlotte Anne Gwatkin in 1790 and they had one daughter.
After a brief interval at Bratton Clovelly they moved permanently to the rectory of Creed in Cornwall. Here, he began to a remarkably accurate chemical analysis of Cornish minerals. From a local mineral from the Menaccan valley (a form of Ilmenite), he isolated the calx of an unknown metal which he named Menaccanite. In 1795 Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovered a new metal (titanium) in the mineral rutile, then showed it to be the same as Gregor’s metal. Gregor later found titanium in corundum from Tibet, and in a tourmaline from a local tin mine.
Never letting his scientific work interfere with his pastoral duties, he was also a distinguished landscape painter, etcher and musician. He died of tuberculosis on 11 June 1817 and was buried in the local churchyard.
Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
