Wendell E. Dunn, Jr.

Wendell Earl Dunn, Jr.
Wendell E. Dunn, Jr.
Born	August 30, 1922 Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Died	December 24, 2007 (2007-12-25) (aged 85) Tucson, Arizona, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation	Chemical Engineer, Inventor
Known for	technologies for high temperature chlorination, gold extraction, tantalum and titanium extraction
Spouse(s)	Lillian D. Dunn, married 1944-1992 (her death)

Wendell Earl Dunn, Jr. (August 30, 1922 – December 24, 2007) was an American chemical engineer, metallurgist, and inventor. His technologies for high temperature chlorination, gold extraction, tantalum and titanium extraction are still widely used.

Dunn was the first son of educator Wendell E. Dunn, for many years principal of Forest Park High School in Baltimore, and brother of conductor Thomas Dunn. A graduate of Baltimore City College and Johns Hopkins University, Dunn was also awarded a doctorate in chemical engineering from Johns Hopkins. After completing the Harvard/MIT V12 program in 1944, he was engaged in aircraft terrain avoidance radar research in both the U.S. and Occupied Germany. Dunn served as captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps until 1946.

In 1950, soon after joining E.I. DuPont de Nemours in Wilmington, Del., Dunn was a key member of the research and development team which perfected DuPont's process for the production of high-purity titanium dioxide as a paint pigment and filed his first sole-inventor U.S. patent in 1954. He remained with the firm for 19 years during which time this process grew to become the dominant technology worldwide.

In 1968 Dunn left DuPont to form his own contract research and development firm in Delaware and Sydney, Australia. He worked closely for several years with a major Australian mining house, Peko-Wallsend Limited, to develop a technology to produce a low-cost titanium process feedstock. Thereafter Dunn returned to South Dakota and for the next three decades made significant contributions to the field of high-temperature chlorination of metal ores.

Between 1975 and 1995 Dunn consulted to international corporations—Reynolds Metals, Kerr-McGee and DuPont, among others—and performed R&D which formed the bases for several start-up ventures in South Dakota and beyond. He worked with the Lien Brothers and others in the Rapid City area to develop processes for the extraction from ore of ultra-pure niobium, and tantalum metals for use in electronic applications, and for the efficient separation and recovery of gold from low-grade ore and scrap.