[Sca-cooks] Metal Poisoning from the fork - i.e. acqueduct
Susan Lord Williams
lordhunt at gmail.com
Mon May 12 16:30:09 PDT 2014
I know nothing about the construction of aqueducts but today water is drunk from that of Segovia which still functions. I think that is proof enough that lead poisoning it not a factor in Segovia aqueduct.
Again we are back to square one? What lead poisoned the Romans?
Aruvqan wrote:
> . . . lead poisoning from the aqueducts is not probable,
> aqueducts were wood, cement, stone and various forms of tile and mortar,
> the lead piping from the bronze joints to the houses and fountains on
> the other hand would be a consideration.
>
> [structurally, the aqueducts were from the various rivers and springs
> around cities at a higher elevations and were made up of building
> materials, there was not enough lead in all of the empire to line all
> the aqueducts with lead, some of them were 10 feet in diameter at the
> source ends, and big enough that a smallish slave could crawl through
> them at the city end, with settling chambers for sediment at various
> points along the way. Fittings made of bronze were let in, so they could
> not be messed with to allow more water than was paid for to flow. Lead
> was only in the final distribution end of things and was fairly
> expensive. It was a product of silver mining mainly, and a fair amount
> actually came from the outskirts of the empire - Britain was a fairly
> major source of lead. It was expensive enough that the few all lead
> coffins discovered in the past few decades were seriously worthy of
> comment by archeologists.]
So what poisoned Romans - their goblets,
>
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