Lead was all around

Hancock's "Half Hour" and "Steptoe and Son", both comedy series written by Galton and Simpson in the 1960's and 70's had more than one reference disreputable characters stealing lead from roofs.  I am reliably informed that one of the murder weapons in the game of Cluedo is a length of lead pipe.   If there was a lot of lead in light entertainment, there was even more of it in Victorian and Edwardian buildings.

In the last couple of years I've more or less become my own builder and whilst renovating my house have come across a lot of lead in one form or another.  To the best of my knowledge, lead is only used for roofs and flashing in modern structures.

Lead roofing

The attraction of lead as a building material is that it is malleable and does not corrode.  From a half remembered conversation with a retired builder, there was once a specialist trade of lead workers whose principle skill was to beat lead sheet into the complex shapes drawn by architects.  The term plumber (which means lead worker) was reserved for people who worked with lead pipe.

At the time our house was built, all the plumbing was lead tubing, working with this stuff would have been hard, a 10 metre run of pipe would have been heavy and it probably needed two men to install, one to do the bending and another to support the pipe until it could be secured to the structure.  Relative to modern plastic plumbing, forming joints and connections would have been a lengthy and skilled task in which the pipe and solder(?) had similar melting temperatures.

A tee junction in lead piping

I was surprised to find lead had been used a sheath for electric cables which might have been installed around 1911.  I'm guessing, but one of the problems with early electric cabling might have been water induced breakdown of insulation.  Whilst lead was not an obvious choice of sheathing material, it would have provides some protection against water.

Lead Sheathed Cable

One of the attractive features of Victorian and Edwardian houses is stained glass windows.  These are segments of glass held together with I-section lead piping.  Over time stained glass windows can sag if they are exposed to the sun and fatigue if they are mounted in doors, thus you get a bill for restoration approximately every hundred years.

Apart from drafts rattles, sash windows are an attractive feature of Victorian houses, concealed in the frames are four counterweights, in the case of our house, there is more than quarter of a ton of cast iron in the windows, however, in grander properties with large windows, lead was used for the sash weights.

Lead would also have been present in accumulators which were used for door bells and other signalling devices and later to heat the filaments in valve radios.  Local shops offered to charge up the accumulators, maybe for a shilling, which was a very expensive way of buying electricity.

Various lead based materials were in regular use, the most common was paint.  Lead paints had a reputation for durability and the pretense of lead implied a premium product.  Whilst lead is no longer used in paint, its previous large scale use makes it necessary to take precautions when sanding down old doors and window frames to avoid inhaling the dust.  Another one was "red lead" which was a sealing compound used with iron and brass pipe fittings.

Until relatively recently tetra-ethyl lead was used in petrol to prevent "pre-ignition" and was often referred to as an "anti-knocking" additive.  The engines in early cars were large had low compression ratios, for example the Model T ford had a swept volume of 2900 cc and a compression ratio of around 4.  When lead as added to petrol, compression ratio could be increased to around 7 or 8 which increased the efficiency of the engine allowing the size of engine to be reduced for a given output.  At the end of the 1930s small cars typically had 1,000 cc engines.  At one time petrol was sold according to with its octane rating denoted by a number of stars and the higher the octane rating, the higher the price and lead content.   By the 1970s, the used of lead in petrol was seen to be detrimental to public health and its used was phased out.