Teleky has described cases of lead poisoning in which silk thread was weighted with acetate of lead. As a consequence a number of women engaged in sewing on fringes with the thread suffered. The English factory inspectors’ reports describe cases from manipulating yarn dyed with chromate of lead.[7]
Chromate of lead and white lead are used in colouring oil-cloth, artificial flowers, paper, rubber goods, pencils, penholders, socks, sealing-wax, candles, and stamps.
USE OF LEAD IN THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Lead poisoning has been frequently observed in such branches of the chemical industry as require large leaden or lead-lined vessels and pipes: the persons affected are principally those engaged in lead burning.
Risk is considerable in manufacture of lead acetate. The most dangerous processes are drying and packing the crystals.
MANUFACTURE OF ELECTRIC ACCUMULATORS
The manufacture of accumulators begins with the casting of lead plates, which are then polished and dressed. Next follows ‘pasting,’ that is, smearing the negative plate with a paste of litharge, the positive plate being ‘formed’ by having an electric current passed through so that the lead is converted into spongy peroxide. The wooden boxes in which the plates are assembled are lead-lined.
The most dangerous processes are casting, wire-brushing, and pasting—the latter especially when done by hand.
In the years 1908 and 1909 among about 761 workers employed in the accumulator factories of Cologne there were fifty-six cases of lead colic and seventy-nine of gastric and intestinal catarrh. Further figures for German accumulator works show that in the two largest accumulator factories in the district of Potsdam employing 142 workers there were fifteen cases in 1904. In Great Britain, in the ten years 1900-1909, 285 cases were reported—an average of about thirty a year.