The word "nitinol" is derived from its composition and its place of discovery: (Nickel Titanium-Naval Ordnance Laboratory). William J. Buehler along with Frederick E. Wang, discovered its properties during research at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1959. Buehler was attempting to make a better missile nose cone, which could resist fatigue, heat and the force of impact. Having found that a 1:1 alloy of nickel and titanium could do the job, in 1961 he presented a sample at a laboratory management meeting. The sample, folded up like an accordion, was passed around and flexed by the participants. One of them applied heat from his pipe lighter to the sample and, to everyone's surprise, the accordion-shaped strip contracted and took its previous shape.
While the potential applications for nitinol were realized immediately, practical efforts to commercialize the alloy did not take place until a decade later. This delay was largely because of the extraordinary difficulty of melting, processing and machining the alloy. Even these efforts encountered financial challenges that were not readily overcome until the 1980s, when these practical difficulties finally began to be resolved.
The discovery of the shape-memory effect in general dates back to 1932, when Swedish chemist Arne Ölander first observed the property in gold–cadmium alloys. The same effect was observed in Cu-Zn (brass) in the early 1950s.