Books playing a leading role

[raspberrysalmon]

...just found and read this and the original post on that bit of legislation that it links to: http://overlawyered.com/2009/02/cpsia-and-vintage-books/Read more... )

Comments

Part 1

[smadaf]

Hooray for the ALA, as usual.  This'll be rectified soon-not soon enough for some dummies to be prevented from doing dumb things, though.  Oh, well / Grrrr.

This one's hard for me, because I generally like the Consumer Product Safety Commission and I like forcing people to make ever less unsafe products-but nothing can make me say to get rid of these leaded books.  If the books had been sitting around at Chernobyl or something, yes, most of them would have to go; but not these.

The beginning of chapter 10, "Getting the Lead Out", of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), starting on page 149:In the late 1940s, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Clair Patterson (who was, first name notwithstanding, an Iowa farm boy by origin) was using a new method of lead isotope measurement to try to get a definitive age for the Earth at last. Unfortunately all his samples came up contaminated-usually wildly so. Most contained something like two hundred times the levels of lead that would normally be

Part 2

[smadaf]

Continuing without a break:Almost at once production workers began to exhibit the staggered gait and confused faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but unyielding denial that would serve it well for decads. As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the Lab, when employees at once plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard." Altogether at least fifteen workers died in the early days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became ill, often violently so; the exact numbers are unknown because the company nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills, and poisonings. At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible, most notably in 1924 when in a matter of days five production workers died and thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks

Part 3

[smadaf]

Skipping to page 157:His main work done, Patterson now turned his attention to the nagging question of lead in the atmosphere. He was astonished to find that what little was known about the effects of lead on humans was almost invariably wrong or misleading-and not surprisingly, he discovered, since for forty years every study of lead's effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives

Part 4

[smadaf]

Continuing without a break:To his great credit, Patterson never wavered of buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago. The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand metric conts a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, "forty-four years after most of Europe," as McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993

Too also.

[smadaf]

I have a Chambourd bottle that has an ornament that fits over the actual sealing plastic cap:  and the inside of the ornament is made of lead, for some reason.

Also, that Sylvester stuff in some European countries, with telling the future by melting lead while kids are around.

You're not the center of everybody's world, Katie.

Re: Too also.

[raspberrysalmon]

I did not (nearly) know all of that. Thanks. :)
I mean, I knew about the toxic properties of those substances, but did not know their history...

> Also, that Sylvester stuff in some European countries, with telling the future by melting lead while kids are around.
...ESPECIALLY when there are kids around...

I must've had my beak in my beaker when I was transcribing.

[smadaf]

than, not thatn
one, not once
stable, not sable
taken, not taking
or, not of
tons, not conts (!)

Actually, I think that's a pretty good rate for almost never looking at the results of my typing.

Oh, bugger and sod!

[smadaf]

I mean Chambord Liqueur Royale de France / Chambord Black Raspberry Liqueur.

(Pfft: I had to enter my birthday and country to get in to chambordonline.com.  Also, although it costs $40 for half a liter, you can get four times that much for just $7 more.)