Social dynamics of toxic metal industry in medieval Europe
cambridge.org
cambridge.org
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.
Turns out some countries are sufficiently shit that it's worth the risk.
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 these states returned them in exchange for a few bucks and empty assurances (which is an tautology - the difference between 'assurance' and 'guarantee' is precisely that there's no legal obligations or bindings with assurances) is because the alternative was being deemed a potentially rogue nuclear state which would have seen them rapidly invaded, very likely be a coalition of nations - viably including the US as well, and disarmed before they could manage to reverse engineer the protocols.
And yeah, Ukraine would not have been invaded if it had its own nukes, neither would Iran. It's also highly unlikely that the revolution, coup, or whatever you want to call it in 2014 would have happened if Ukraine had nukes. That involved things like John McCain giving speeches encouraging Ukrainians to overthrow their Russian-leaning president right in the center of Kyiv. [1] That was a massive power play that probably would never have happened with a nuclear state. Similar for the assassination of Soleimani in Iran, and so on. In any case, if a country wants to guarantee its sovereignty, it needs nukes.
And the reason this guarantees sovereignty is because every single country is aware of Proud Prophet [2] even if most people are not. It was a large scale nuclear wargame simulating all sorts of scenarios for 'peace through force' with nuclear weapons. In every single scenario it resulted in the defacto extinction of the Northern hemisphere. It led the US to turn away from escalation and hostility and towards reconciliation and negotiation with the USSR. Within a decade the first McDonalds would open up in the USSR, and shortly thereafter the entire USSR would collapse with Donald Duck being held up as a sign of freedom.
I don’t think rolling the dice to see if a total nuclear exchange occurs is ever worth it and neither does any leader of a nuclear armed state (so far).
Second scene: Parking warden catches Putin in a disabled space, says "I have a nuclear bomb", warden leaves him alone.
Third scene: Putin's playing a card game and making up the rules, opponent objects, Putin says "I have a nuclear bomb", opponent lets him do whatever.
Fourth scene: Putin cuts to the front of a line, says "I have a nuclear bomb", but the person he cut in front of (apparently Biden) says "I also have a nuclear bomb", but Putin says "but I have a nuclear bomb and I'm crazy", and the guy lets him stay at the front of the line.
There's a good comment too: "Missed opportunity. At the end, in line, when [Biden] points out to Putin, "Look, I have a nuclear bomb too," the others in line should have gotten angry with him, saying things like, "You see, you're a bully?", "What are you doing, threatening? Reckless!", "You're provoking him!", and Orsini should have appeared and said, "This is how we risk escalation!" "
They're attacking us.
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:
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.
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).
Water tends to slowly eat away calcium, not the other way around.
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?
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).
I thought we were talking about lead?
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-022-00703-8
https://www.sdu.dk/en/om-sdu/fakulteterne/naturvidenskab/nyh...
in vino veritas, but apparently not sanitas.
And as my German godmother used to add: im Cola weiss nicht was.
I’ll bet witchcraft got brought up, and praying to the wrong god or going to the wrong church.
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.
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:
"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"
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!”