>Ancient Romans knew that lead water pipes were unhealthy and so they preferred terracotta pipes.
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.
Read Vitrivius's De Architectura, specifically the part on building aqueducts. It's basically a manual for "So the Emperor told you to build a city from scratch…"
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.
Yeah and they knew that was bad too. Probably if they had a good way of testing for lead acetate, they'd probably have thrown the occasional wine merchant to the lions.
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.
Hoover was a pretty amazing man and a pretty miserable president. A mining engineer who made his pile working in China. He claimed he was literally first Stanford University student (he showed up days early when the college first opened and he stayed in the dorms by himself.)
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.
He was also chosen to tour and report on post-Second World War Germany due to his experience from similar humanitarian missions he undertook in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.
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.
Not only that, up to the late 20th century many products other than pipes contained lead. Lead paint, leaded gasoline, etc. The jury was out on lead in everyday use until quite recently.
I doubt the poisonous nature of lead was well known when these cities were built.
Most homes built before 1960 contain heavily leaded paint[0]. My assertion isn't that lead wasn't believed to be dangerous, rather that no one saw it as "seriously" dangerous.
> 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."
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.