Lead has been used as a conduit for water for thousands of years. The Roman Empire, in particular, made extensive use of lead—a malleable material—for water transport. Scientific observation about the harms of lead in drinking water goes back at least hundreds of years. Bernardino Ramazzini documented disorders associated with lead exposure among workers in the 1700s. J. Lockhart Gibson documented the consequences of lead poisoning among children in 1904, and at the turn of the twentieth century, there was rapidly growing awareness of the potential harms of lead poisoning, particularly in children.
In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency put in place a ban on lead in plumbing materials in 1986, followed by the Lead and Copper Rule as the National Primary Drinking Water Regulation in 1991. Today, about 9.2 million lead service lines continue to deliver water to communities in the U.S. The EPA created a $15 billion fund to eliminate this problem, literally hundreds of years after science first documented the challenge of using lead pipes to deliver water.
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