White Lead
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for White Lead. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
The Encyclopedia of Founding (1892)
Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
The carbonate of lead. It is produced by several methods, and extensively employed as a paint. The Dutch method, usually considered a good one, is to place thin sheets of lead rolled into scrolls into earthen pots with weak vinegar or acetic acid. These are fitted with lead covers and closely packed, and buried in spent tan-bark. The acid corrodes the metal, forming a coating of acetate of lead. The carbonic acid set free by the decomposing vegetable matter displaces the acetic acid, combines with the lead, and the carbonate is formed. The acetic acid thus released attacks more metal, which is again carbonized, and thus, with occasional charges of vinegar, the operation is continued and the lead keeps constantly changing. See LEAD.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
a preparation of lead used as the basis of white paint. It is prepared by subjecting sheets of lead to the action of acetic acid, an active principle present in vinegar. In making white lead one method is the following: Sheets of lead shaped like pies are piled on one another in earthen pots containing a little acetic acid. The pots are stacked in a pit which is covered with spent tanbark and allowed to stand for three months. A little over half of the metal will be found converted into white lead. As it is not subject to atmospheric influences, it makes, with linseed oil, the best of white paint for the protection of wooden surfaces. See Paint
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a dense white powder, insoluble in water, but easily dissolved in dilute nitric or acetic acid; extensively employed in painting.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 called white lead, ground in linseed oil, "the best of white paint for the protection of wooden surfaces" — a judgement no paint chemist would make today. Within a decade of Collier's 1921 entry the International Labour Organisation's White Lead (Painting) Convention of 1921 was pressing governments to ban its use in interior work, and titanium dioxide, produced commercially from the late 1910s, went on to displace it almost entirely as the white pigment in paint. The United States barred lead paint from housing in 1978, and the corroding-stack process the older entries describe in such detail — lead scrolls, vinegar and spent tan-bark — has vanished from the trade. Lead paint on old woodwork is now treated as a hazard requiring controlled removal, chiefly because of the damage lead does to children's developing brains.
Written for this edition, 2026.