From the Middle Ages on, people put lead acetate or " sugar of lead " into wine and other foods to make them sweeter. Lead touched many areas of Roman life. It made up pipes and dishes, cosmetics and coins, and paints.
Eventually, as a host of mysterious maladies became more common, some Romans began to suspect a connection between the metal and these illnesses. Julius Caesar , for example, managed to father only one child, even though he enjoyed women as much as he enjoyed wine.
His successor, Caesar Augustus , was reported to be completely sterile. Some scholars suggest that lead could have been the culprit for the condition of both men and a contributing factor to the fall of the Roman Empire. A form of lead intoxication known as saturnine gout takes its name from ancient Rome. Saturn was a demonic god, a gloomy and sluggish figure who ate his own children.
The Romans noticed similarities between symptoms of this disorder and the irritable god, and named the disease after him. Scientists have since learned that while there are similarities between saturnine gout and primary gout, such as elevated blood uric acid levels, these are in fact two distinct diseases that could not have been cured.
With its corrosion resistance, lead was used to make the roofs of churches and houses in lead-rich countries, including America, from the late Middle Ages. Originally, the lead-chamber process used for making sulfate was also due to its corrosion resistance properties. Because of the environmental pollution caused by lead , its application was severely reduced in the s.
Nowadays, gasoline, fuel, soldering and conduit are commonly produced without lead. Industry development In recent years, the lead industry has developed hugely due to its impressive properties. The records of the International Lead and Zinc Study Group showed that in , global refined lead production was Eighty percent of the lead produced in the world goes into lead accumulators.
And as the life span of batteries is years, the lead recycling industry is also developing apace. In such cases we would ask you to sign a Visual Elements licence agreement, tailored to the specific use you propose. The RSC makes no representations whatsoever about the suitability of the information contained in the documents and related graphics published on this Site for any purpose.
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Nor shall the RSC be in any event liable for any damage to your computer equipment or software which may occur on account of your access to or use of the Site, or your downloading of materials, data, text, software, or images from the Site, whether caused by a virus, bug or otherwise. Jump to main content. Periodic Table. Glossary Allotropes Some elements exist in several different structural forms, called allotropes. Glossary Group A vertical column in the periodic table.
Fact box. Group 14 Melting point Glossary Image explanation Murray Robertson is the artist behind the images which make up Visual Elements. Appearance The description of the element in its natural form. Biological role The role of the element in humans, animals and plants. Natural abundance Where the element is most commonly found in nature, and how it is sourced commercially.
Uses and properties. Image explanation. Lead has been known to, and used by, humans for many centuries. This long history is reflected in the image by the use of an early alchemical symbol for lead and carved Ancient Roman characters.
A dull, silvery-grey metal. It is soft and easily worked into sheets. This easily worked and corrosion-resistant metal has been used for pipes, pewter and paint since Roman times. It has also been used in lead glazes for pottery and, in this century, insecticides, hair dyes and as an anti-knocking additive for petrol.
All these uses have now been banned, replaced or discouraged as lead is known to be detrimental to health, particularly that of children. Lead is still widely used for car batteries, pigments, ammunition, cable sheathing, weights for lifting, weight belts for diving, lead crystal glass, radiation protection and in some solders.
It is often used to store corrosive liquids. It is also sometimes used in architecture, for roofing and in stained glass windows. Biological role. Lead has no known biological role. It can accumulate in the body and cause serious health problems. It is toxic, teratogenic disturbs the development of an embryo or foetus and carcinogenic. Daily intake of lead from all sources is about 0.
The average human body stores about milligrams of lead in the bones. Natural abundance. Lead is chiefly obtained from the mineral galena by a roasting process.
Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History. Lead has been mined for more than 6, years, and the metal and its compounds have been used throughout history. Small lead nuggets have been found in pre-Columbian Peru, Yucatan, and Guatemala. The Greeks mined lead on a large scale from onwards and not only knew how to obtain the metal but how to covert this to white lead.
Because of its superb covering power, this was the basis of paints for more than years, until the middle of the last century. The Romans employed lead on a large scale, mining it mainly in Spain and Britain, and using it also for water pipes, coffins, pewter tableware, and to debase their silver coinage. While its mining declined in the Dark Ages it reappeared in Medieval times and found new uses, such as pottery glazes, bullets, and printing type.
In the last century it was a fuel additive. Atomic data. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey.
Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk. Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled. Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators.
Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Supply risk.
Relative supply risk 6. Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance.
Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Lead Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hello, this week we're sinking to new depths as we meet the metal that spawned the plumb line, a rock group, plumbing and even poisoning, not to mention a generation of alchemists who tried in vain to turn this substance into gold.
It is of course lead, and here to swing it for us is science writer Phil Ball. Lead is the Eeyore of metals - slow, dull and heavy. In its Latin form, plumbum , it enters our vocabulary by virtue of its soft and ponderous character: we once plumbed depths with a suspended grey blob of the stuff, emphatically commanded by gravity, while plumbers have long since traded their malleable lead pipes for plastic.
Everything associated with lead tends towards over-burdened gloom: in the ancient scheme of metal symbolism, lead was linked to Saturn, the melancholy planet, personified by the old god also called Cronos who castrated his father and swallowed his children. Even the spark of glamour the metal gets from association with the world's greatest rock band stems from the Eeyorish prediction that they would sink like a lead balloon or zeppelin. Yes, lead is the original heavy metal, the most notorious offender in that toxic group.
Lead damages the brain and the kidneys, it can cause anaemia and a form of gout with the doleful title of saturnine gout. Even the Romans knew about lead poisoning - the doctor Cornelius Celsus warned about the bad effects of lead white, used in paint and cosmetics, while the engineer Vitruvius recommended earthenware pipes over lead ones.
Yet we were slow to learn. Lead white, a form of lead carbonate, remained the artist's best white pigment right up until the nineteenth century, when it was replaced by zinc white.
As paint manufacture became industrialized, lead white spread sickness and death among factory workers: a report in the Transactions of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century listed vertigo, dizziness, blindness, stupidity and paralytic affections among the conditions it caused. And as late as in the toy manufacturer Mattel was forced to recall millions of toys made in China that had been coloured with lead paint. Meanwhile, a toxic trickle of lead from solder and the electrodes of batteries leaches slowly from landfill sites throughout the world.
In the European Union effectively banned lead from most consumer electronics, but it remains in use elsewhere. To alchemists, lead was the lowliest of metals - in a sense, it was where all metals started. In talk of base metals, which alchemy tried to turn to silver and gold, there was none so base as lead.
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