As a random aside, he also includes a proof that the water level mechanism he prefers works even though the Earth is a (roughly) spherical object and not a flat plane.
For when lead is smelted in casting the fumes from it settle upon their members and day after day burn out and take away all the virtues of the blood from their limbs Hence water ought by no means to be conducted in lead pipes if we want to have it wholesome That the taste is better when it comes from clay pipes may be proved by everyday life for though our tables are loaded with silver vessels yet everybody uses earthenware for the sake of purity of taste.
Google books, pg 246 https://goo.gl/g19bhQ
I have a copy of De re Metallica[1] it has a whole chapter on stuff like this and that's 1500's Europe. Lead is kinda tricky since it tends to get passivized most of the time by sulfate and phosphate. Except when it doesn't and then it's insidiously bad.
[1] Translated Herbert Hoover (yes that one).
He and his wife (who was also a geologist) were fluent in Chinese and would speak in it if they wanted privacy.
He became known for international humanitarian missions during and after the first world war. He became a national figure by directing flood relief operations during the 1927 Mississippi Flood, which catapulted him into the White House a year later.
He was a much better humanitarian than he was a president. And pretty good geologist and linguist too.
Does anyone think that it's possible that there will be another career engineer as POTUS? I've heard that there remains a sort of stigma to such a thing, perhaps in part due to the Hoover administration.
I think there's a better batting average for college professors than engineers.
I doubt the poisonous nature of lead was well known when these cities were built.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-based_paint_in_the_Unit...
> In the July 1904 edition of its monthly publication, Sherwin-Williams reported the dangers of paint containing lead, noting that a French expert had deemed lead paint "poisonous in a large degree, both for the workmen and for the inhabitants of a house painted with lead colors."
"Poisonous in a large degree" seems pretty serious to me.
People were regularly dropping dead due to lead poisoning in factories by the turn of the century, and it looks like lead was recognized as being capable of doing significant, though hard-to-recognize, harm:
"Although plumbism is usually easy to diagnose, lead occasionally induces obscure affections of the nervous system, the cause and true nature of which are not always easily recognized. As a cause of poverty, too, its influence is not sufficiently known nor the role it may be playing in the physical degeneracy of the race."
https://books.google.com/books?id=gQY9AAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA29&ots=...
Lead paint looks to have been largely banned in Europe in favor of zinc-based paint by 1911; it was clearly viewed as a public health threat, not least by housepainters themselves, who were dying of lead poisoning (see the table on page 25).
Do you have a source for this? At the same time, they used lead acetate to sweeten wine and food, which is way more dangerous. If they made the weaker connection between health and water pipes, they should have been able to connect health and this as well.