Elements: Lead
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2014
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lead is the sweetest of poisons, blamed for everything from mad Roman emperors to modern-day crime waves. Yet a lead-acid battery is still what gets your car going in the morning. So have we finally learnt how to handle this heavyweight element?
Justin Rowlatt travels to arts shop Cornelissen in London's Bloomsbury to find out why they've stopped stocking the stuff, and hear from professor Andrea Sella of University College London, about the unique properties that have made it so handy in everything from radiation protection to glassware. Yet lead in petrol is also accused of having inflicted brain damage on an entire generation of children in the 1970s, as the economist Jessica Wolpaw-Reyes of Amherst College explains.
And, producer Laurence Knight travels to one of the UK's only two lead smelters - HJ Enthoven's at Darley Dale in Derbyshire, the historical heartland of the UK lead industry - to see what becomes of the lead in your car battery, and speak to the director of the International Lead Association, Andy Bush.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm Justin Roller, and today I am taking business daily on the road. |
| 0:11.1 | I've been driving in my car. |
| 0:15.0 | It's not quite a Jaguar. |
| 0:17.1 | Welcome to the latest in our series exploring the role of the chemical elements in the world economy. |
| 0:22.3 | And this week, we are weighing up lead. |
| 0:26.3 | This metal has had a long association with the motor car, but it is an unfortunate one, |
| 0:31.8 | because lead is poisonous. |
| 0:35.1 | From the madness of Roman emperors to a 1980s crime wave, this week's element has a lot to |
| 0:41.1 | answer for. So have we finally learned how to handle this elemental heavyweight? |
| 0:50.2 | Today I'm in search of one of the few places where you can still buy lead-based products. |
| 0:56.5 | And I'm very glad to say that it's taken me out of the office and into the streets of London, |
| 1:01.5 | right into the heart of Bloomsbury, to an art supply, a very old-fashioned shop called El Cornelison. |
| 1:08.1 | And it's a beautiful Georgian shopfront. An old sign saying they're open, so let's go inside. |
| 1:15.3 | And the walls are lined with products. They've got beautiful coloured paper hanging in the window. |
| 1:20.4 | And then behind the counter, there are rank after rank of numbered boxes. |
| 1:25.9 | Presumably this is how art supplies were sold years ago, and I can |
| 1:29.3 | see up there it says it was established in 1855. And Nicholas Walt, you own and run the shop, is that right? |
| 1:36.4 | I own it and the staff run it. But the reason we've come here is because this is one of the few places |
| 1:42.3 | where you can still buy, |
| 1:46.3 | in theory at least, lead-based products. |
| 1:51.3 | Well, we don't sell them anymore, but we have an archive. |
| 1:54.0 | So what's the role of lead in art? Well, it's extremely important in the pigment that we call flate white or lead carbonate. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.