Lead Industries Association, 1939

[medren.livejournal.com]

Ah, lead paint...I can't see that there will ever be a problem with that...

Comments

Not that this wasn't known

[ijusten.livejournal.com]

Lead has been known to be poisonous for millenia. The first known recorded writing on lead-poisoning was from the first century AD Greece. Even if this was forgotten, it was again widely known during renaissance. Few hundred years later it was common enough knowledge that a pulp writer like Alexander Dumas wrote about a barkeeper who gets arrested for sweetening his wine with lead (and thus poisoning his customers). It was also known that even

Using lead in painting (or in bug sprays) wasn't about ignorance, but about indifference.

Reading Wikipedia;

Julius Caesar's engineer, Vitruvius, reported, "water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes. For it seems to be made injurious by lead, because white lead is produced by it, and this is said to be harmful to the human body."

And even if we talk about only lead paint, the first research that connects lead paint and childhood lead poisoning to each other was made in Australia in 1897, forty year before the above ad was made.

And then the money shot;

France, Belgium and Austria banned white-lead interior paints in 1909; the League of Nations followed suit in 1922.[32] However, in the US, laws banning lead house paint were not passed until 1971, and it was phased out and not fully banned until 1978.

Italics taken from Wikipedia-article "lead poisoning". The article was heavily sourced and goes well together with what I knew beforehand.

Re: Not that this wasn't known

[ijusten.livejournal.com]

It was also known that even drinking from lead-cup was poisonous. Which leads to the Ceasar-comment. Proofreading has never been my strong suit. Sorry.