So wild and sad, reading the article and discussing the subject with a “knowledgeable entity”. (It’s great having smart “friends” that don’t mind when you pester them with rabbit hole questions at 3am.)
The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.
The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.
Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.
Same for the mediterranian island of Elba. It was the most important source of iron first for the Etruscans and later for the Romans, but the deposits contained significant quantities of lead, which can also still be found in Alpine glaciers. It was known to the greeks as the sooty island, the Etruscans called it the island of a thousand fires. The last mine was closed in the 1980s after over 2000 years.
I have met and seen multiple individuals handling and strapping exposed lead to pickleball paddles in recent years.
It is maddening.
Without education younger people reasonably have little understanding .
People born in the 60s and maybe 70s have the leaded gasoline termination and leaded paint public awareness efforts to inform them.
I don’t think people born in the late 90s or early 2000s have been exposed to the news of the risks of lead so much.
To be fair, metallic lead is probably the least dangerous form of lead, since it tends not to spread or be absorbed very well by the body (it's mainly a problem in plumbing, for example, when other stuff in the water starts to dissolve it). Still something to be a little careful about.
It’s the same with awareness of nuclear annihilation. Younger generations just don’t seem to understand the threat - whereas generations of the 60’s/70’s/80’s sure do ..
Well it has resulted in a younger generation that thinks its okay to attack nuclear powered states, so I think some awareness of it needs to be maintained across generations .. otherwise the thing manifests itself.
And besides which, it is actionable. The peoples of the world could actually disarm. It has happened.
Ukraine gave away its nukes and now look what’s happening. And yea, we should be attacking even nuclear armed states if they are invading others.
They are a threat that means we probably shouldn’t push a nation armed with them to the point where they feel their back against a wall, but it’s not “we get to do what we want with no resistance whatsoever” card
Yeah, a funny thing with leaded solder being forbidden these days is that it isn't really about dangers when soldering with it, the issue is when it ends up in a garbage dump and leaches out.
The reason you still need fume extraction when soldering is the flux, those fumes are quite nasty to inhale. (How nasty varies based on the specific formulation, I recommend using proper ventilation for all of it though.)
(For those who don't know, the flux is there to prevent/clean oxidation and make the solder flow onto the metal pads and pins. Most solder wire contain a core of flux and you can also add additional flux if needed, usually liquid or a paste that melts into a liquid.)
I grew up in Hope, near Castleton, and worked for several years as a tour guide at Speedwell Cavern which is a failed lead mine from the 1700's.
This was a fascinating read as I knew lots of the later history, but as the article points out, the earlier history is much less well known.
I wonder what the community vibe would have been like, in these places where lead smelting was so prevalent.
We all (now) know the effects of severe lead poisoning. Delirium and hallucinations, miscarriage and still births, anemia .. what would these forboding circumstances have been attributed to at the time?
Did people understand how hazardous the production of lead was?
The "ancients" (Roman era writers and workers, post Roman UK Peak District lead workers, the Chinese, etc) understood the hazards of acute lead poisoning first hand and often referenced mad hatters, crazy painters, and the symptoms of extreme exposure in literature.
What they seemingly failed to grasp until more recent times was the slow creep of incremental mild exposure:
However, they were so fond of its diverse uses that they minimized the hazards it posed. Romans of yesteryear, like Americans of today, equated limited exposure to lead with limited risk. What they did not realize was that their everyday low-level exposure to the metal rendered them vulnerable to chronic lead poisoning, even while it spared them the full horrors of acute lead poisoning.
Lead is very flexible and was used even in the last century in Germany for I think roof transitions, fresh water pipes etc. I inherited a nice town house from 1900 which still has lead pipes, but I let them install new ones so the old ones are now dead in the walls as a piece of history.
I think the idea was that water pipes will build up a later of calcium anyway, so they aren't harmful.
In Germany there are probably tons of lead pipes still in existence and and only from 2026 is there a law that they all _have_ to replaced (previously they could stay as long as the water lead content was in the permitted range, but I don't think anybody ever checked).
Same in Switzerland. I work in a building built in the 70s, after the ban of lead, but the plumbers used up their old stock of lead piping before buying new stuff, so the tap water in the building still contains lead. (just under the legal treshold to take action, yay)
> Apparently they had no idea it was bad in medieval times.
Tell me more, how do we know this to be true?
> The wealthy were particularly afflicted, as lead was used in glazes
Sure .. but you're saying that "the wealthy" purchased poorly fired earthenware and had high acid diets?
Traditional pottery and other forms of ceramicware are made with earthenware, a porous form of clay which must be glazed in order for the pottery to hold food or liquid. Glazing applies and fuses a thin, glass-like coating onto the surface of the clay to seal its pores. The glaze – which may contain lead to facilitate the melting of glaze particles – fuses to the pottery when it is fired in a kiln, a special oven used to bake clay. When the pottery is fired at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time, essentially all the lead is bound into the glaze.
To the best of my knowledge it takes continuous leaching by > ~ 4% acetic acid (from acidic food and drink) of poorly fired lead glaze earthenware for lead glaze to become "potentially hazardous"
> The common folk weren't spared though, as they were caught up in production.
I would have though production would be where the worst actual exposure occurred, breathing in fumes from liquid mercury.
That would be the more extreme acute exposure, that was known about as problematic in medieval times (at least to those people who read and copied earlier manuscripts regarding minerals, processing, health, etc).
Why bother with books when we can just vibe-feel "history", 'ey?
Hence gout and stone afflict the human race;
Hence lazy jaundice with her saffron face;
Palsy, with shaking head and tott'ring knees.
And bloated dropsy, the staunch sot's disease;
Consumption, pale, with keen but hollow eye,
And sharpened feature, shew'd that death was nigh.
The feeble offspring curse their crazy sires,
And, tainted from his birth, the youth expires.
~ Description of lead poisoning by an anonymous Roman hermit who failed to mention witchcraft, wrong gods, bad churches.
So in 1829 a comedian presented it as a rhyming translation in their satirical book, but (AFAICT) they never told anyone what the original Roman text was?
I'm suspicious whether the original actually ever existed.
Apician Morsels; or, Tales of the Table, Kitchen, and Larder "a farrago of gastronomical curiosities published in 1829 under the pseudonym Dick Humelbergius Secundus" isn't exactly comedic, but you're right to question its sources.
AFAICT it draws from the same source pool as the more scholarly papers and articles on Sugar and Lead in the Roman Empire.
I cited that little ditty as it headed the USofA EPA May 1985 by Jack Lewis that I cited from above ( https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-hist... ) that article in response to the "Did lead kill The Roman Empire" debate roaring back into life in 1983 after an article in the New England Journal of Medicine speculated that it did.
So, to defer to a clearer quote from Roman times about what was and was not known:
"Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system.
Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them"
I like to fantasize about a TV show where I go to the past and tell famous people about their impact to film their reactions. Not sure if this would be on the list. "We dug up your teeth to measure the lead content and determined you were poor."
Bring a camera, it could make good (if wildly disturbing) reality TV. You wandering Medieval England, wearing a face mask, gloves and a Tyvek suit, with your completely unknown accent, trying to convince a whole society “you’re doing it all wrong!”
The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.
The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.
Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.
Without education younger people reasonably have little understanding .
People born in the 60s and maybe 70s have the leaded gasoline termination and leaded paint public awareness efforts to inform them. I don’t think people born in the late 90s or early 2000s have been exposed to the news of the risks of lead so much.
And besides which, it is actionable. The peoples of the world could actually disarm. It has happened.
Ukraine gave away its nukes and now look what’s happening. And yea, we should be attacking even nuclear armed states if they are invading others.
They are a threat that means we probably shouldn’t push a nation armed with them to the point where they feel their back against a wall, but it’s not “we get to do what we want with no resistance whatsoever” card
The reason you still need fume extraction when soldering is the flux, those fumes are quite nasty to inhale. (How nasty varies based on the specific formulation, I recommend using proper ventilation for all of it though.)
(For those who don't know, the flux is there to prevent/clean oxidation and make the solder flow onto the metal pads and pins. Most solder wire contain a core of flux and you can also add additional flux if needed, usually liquid or a paste that melts into a liquid.)
why you think that touching lead is already dangerous to health?
We all (now) know the effects of severe lead poisoning. Delirium and hallucinations, miscarriage and still births, anemia .. what would these forboding circumstances have been attributed to at the time?
Did people understand how hazardous the production of lead was?
What they seemingly failed to grasp until more recent times was the slow creep of incremental mild exposure:
~ Lead Poisoning: A Historical Perspective (1985) https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-hist...In Germany there are probably tons of lead pipes still in existence and and only from 2026 is there a law that they all _have_ to replaced (previously they could stay as long as the water lead content was in the permitted range, but I don't think anybody ever checked).
The wealthy were particularly afflicted, as lead was used in glazes; which common folk couldn't afford.
The common folk weren't spared though, as they were caught up in production.
I imagine it could have greatly affected the development of societal norms.
Tell me more, how do we know this to be true?
> The wealthy were particularly afflicted, as lead was used in glazes
Sure .. but you're saying that "the wealthy" purchased poorly fired earthenware and had high acid diets?
~ https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/que...To the best of my knowledge it takes continuous leaching by > ~ 4% acetic acid (from acidic food and drink) of poorly fired lead glaze earthenware for lead glaze to become "potentially hazardous"
> The common folk weren't spared though, as they were caught up in production.
I would have though production would be where the worst actual exposure occurred, breathing in fumes from liquid mercury.
That would be the more extreme acute exposure, that was known about as problematic in medieval times (at least to those people who read and copied earlier manuscripts regarding minerals, processing, health, etc).
I’ll bet witchcraft got brought up, and praying to the wrong god or going to the wrong church.
I'm suspicious whether the original actually ever existed.
AFAICT it draws from the same source pool as the more scholarly papers and articles on Sugar and Lead in the Roman Empire.
I cited that little ditty as it headed the USofA EPA May 1985 by Jack Lewis that I cited from above ( https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-hist... ) that article in response to the "Did lead kill The Roman Empire" debate roaring back into life in 1983 after an article in the New England Journal of Medicine speculated that it did.
So, to defer to a clearer quote from Roman times about what was and was not known:
~ Vitruvius De Architectura (VIII.6.10-11) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius )We can be confidant that an Architect / Engineer born ~ 70 BC understood lead to be health hazard without appeal to any gods or witches.
“I can’t go to sleep yet hun, somebody on the internet doesn’t learn the way I think they should!”