Kehoe's legacy...

https://gizmodo.com/half-of-americans-e ... 1848618519

...
Overall, they estimated that childhood lead exposure in the U.S. resulted in a collective drop of 824 million IQ points, or almost three points on average per person.
...

Of course, the study is for US alone so there is no comparative studies I know of for other countries.

And to think kids of my day used to make homemade tattoos out of the lead in lead pencils. You take a number 2 pencil and draw your design very heavily on a piece of paper. You trace over it over and over to make it very dark. Then you wet the area of your skin (usually by licking it) where you wish to apply your homemade design and hold it down until the skin absorbs the lead, transferring the image.



Some kids had a nasty habit of sucking and biting on the business end of a lead pencil.

The "lead" in pencils is graphite, a form of carbon.

cthia wrote:And to think kids of my day used to make homemade tattoos out of the lead in lead pencils. You take a number 2 pencil and draw your design very heavily on a piece of paper. You trace over it over and over to make it very dark. Then you wet the area of your skin (usually by licking it) where you wish to apply your homemade design and hold it down until the skin absorbs the lead, transferring the image.



Some kids had a nasty habit of sucking and biting on the business end of a lead pencil.

Thanks for the reply jontom. I was shocked to hear that. I don't know why they ever called them lead pencils because a quick search shows they were never made of lead.

But that is good, because I helped apply a few of those tattoos. However, the same site did say that the paint used to color the pencils did contain lead, up until 1940. Before my time, but I doubt the habit of chewing on pencils started with my era. Oh well.

They were made with 'Spanish Lead', also known as graphite.

cthia wrote:Thanks for the reply jontom. I was shocked to hear that. I don't know why they ever called them lead pencils because a quick search shows they were never made of lead.

But that is good, because I helped apply a few of those tattoos. However, the same site did say that the paint used to color the pencils did contain lead, up until 1940. Before my time, but I doubt the habit of chewing on pencils started with my era. Oh well.