Lead · element 82
Soft, heavy and easy to melt, lead built Roman plumbing, powered a century of cars and poisoned generations
Key facts
Lead is a dull, bluish grey metal so soft you can scratch it with a fingernail and melt it over a camping stove. It was one of the first metals people ever smelted, and for most of history it seemed almost too useful: it kept rain off cathedrals, carried water through Roman cities, printed books and stopped engines knocking.
The catch, understood slowly and at great cost, is that lead builds up in the body and damages the brain, especially in children. Over the past fifty years lead has been removed from petrol, paint, pipes, solder and toys, and blood lead levels have fallen dramatically. It has not gone away; it still starts your car.
Where it is found
The main ore of lead is galena, lead sulfide, which forms heavy, shiny grey cubes and is often rich in silver; for centuries silver was the prize and lead the by-product. Galena weathers into cerussite and anglesite, which are also worked. China, Australia, the United States, Peru and Mexico are the biggest miners today. Britain once mined a great deal in the Pennines, Derbyshire and mid-Wales.
Lead is unusually common for a heavy metal, roughly as abundant as tin, and there is a nuclear reason: three of its four stable isotopes are the final resting point of the uranium and thorium decay chains, so lead has been accumulating throughout the Earth's history. More than half the lead used today is recycled, mostly from old car batteries.
How it was discovered
Lead beads from Anatolia are more than eight thousand years old, so its discovery predates writing. The Romans made it an industrial metal. Their word plumbum gave us the symbol Pb and the words plumber and plumb line. They used lead for water pipes, roofing, coins, cosmetics, and cooking pots in which they boiled down grape juice, unknowingly making sweet, toxic lead acetate.
Medieval builders roofed cathedrals with lead and set stained glass in lead strips, and Gutenberg's printing type was a lead alloy. Alchemists linked lead to the planet Saturn, and lead poisoning was long called saturnism.
What we use it for
Around 85 per cent of the lead used today goes into lead-acid batteries, the kind that start petrol and diesel cars and back up telephone exchanges and hospitals. They are heavy and old fashioned, but cheap, reliable and almost completely recyclable.
Lead's density makes it the standard material for stopping radiation: the apron at the dentist, the walls of X-ray rooms and the casks that carry nuclear material. It still covers roofs and seals joints on older buildings, ballasts yacht keels and sheathes some undersea cables, and lead oxide gives crystal glass its sparkle and weight. Uses now banned or restricted include paint, petrol additives, solder in electronics, wheel weights, small fishing weights and shot for wildfowl.
Reading the numbers
Lead melts at about 327 °C and boils at 1750 °C. That low melting point is why ancient people could cast it so easily and why plumbers could join pipes with a blowtorch. Its density of 11.34 grams per cubic centimetre makes it eleven times as dense as water and about half again as dense as iron, which is why a small lead weight feels so heavy.
The electron configuration [Xe] 4f14 5d10 6s2 6p2 puts four electrons in the outer shell, so lead sits in group 14 beneath carbon, silicon, germanium and tin. Carbon shares all four electrons to make four bonds; lead mostly uses only two, forming Pb2+ ions, because its 6s pair is held tightly and stays out of bonding. The ionisation energies show this clearly: the first two electrons cost 716 and 1450 kJ/mol, but the third jumps to over 3000 kJ/mol. An electronegativity of 1.87 places lead among the less reactive metals, and it protects itself with a thin oxide skin.
Safety and the environment
Lead is a cumulative poison with no known safe level for children. It interferes with the developing brain, lowering IQ and affecting behaviour, and in adults it raises blood pressure and damages kidneys. It gets into people through old paint dust, old water pipes, contaminated soil near roads and smelters, some imported cosmetics and spices, and game shot with lead.
The removal of lead from petrol, completed worldwide in 2021, and from paint has cut children's blood lead levels in Britain and America by well over 90 per cent since the 1970s. Remaining problems include lead pipes in older homes, the poisoning of swans and wildfowl by shot and fishing weights, and unsafe battery recycling in poorer countries.
Did you know?
- Lead pollution from Roman smelters can be measured in Greenland ice cores laid down two thousand years ago.
- The lead in pencils has never been lead; it is graphite, mistaken for a lead ore when it was first mined in Cumbria.
- Lead-208 is the heaviest atomic nucleus that is considered completely stable, and three of lead's isotopes are the end products of uranium and thorium decay.
- The words plumber and plumbing come from plumbum, the Latin name for lead, because Roman water pipes were made from it.
- Leaded petrol was finally eliminated worldwide in 2021, when the last country stopped selling it.
- Lead crystal glass sparkles because lead oxide raises the glass's refractive index and makes it bend light more strongly.
More in the post-transition metals
Column-mates come first, since elements in one column have outer electrons arranged in a similar way and tend to behave alike; the rest are the nearest neighbours in the family.
See all 12 post-transition metals on one page, or browse all 118 elements.
Compare Lead with another element
Each comparison has a side-by-side data table and a plain-English summary of the differences.
Frequently asked questions
Is it safe to touch lead?
Briefly handling solid lead is low risk because very little passes through skin, but you should wash your hands afterwards and never eat or smoke while handling it. The danger comes from lead dust, fumes and flakes that are swallowed or breathed in, especially by children.
Why was lead added to petrol?
Tetraethyl lead, introduced in the 1920s, stopped engines knocking and allowed higher compression. It was phased out from the 1970s once its contribution to lead pollution and its damage to catalytic converters were understood. The UK banned it in 2000.
Why are car batteries still made with lead?
Lead-acid batteries are cheap, deliver the large current needed to turn a starter motor, work in the cold, and are recycled at rates above 95 per cent in Europe and North America. Lithium batteries are catching up but cost more.
Is lead magnetic?
No. Lead is weakly diamagnetic, so it is very slightly repelled by a magnet. Magnets are sometimes used to check that a supposedly lead object is not iron in disguise.
Read next
Guess the mystery element in six tries. A new one every day, free, no sign-up.
Written by Anthony. Updated September 2026. Numerical data from Periodic-Table-JSON (CC BY-SA), cross-checked against the Lead reference article. Spotted an error? Tell us.