It was the Romans who came up with the idea of using lead for plumbing--naming plumbing after their word for lead, "plumbum," or liquid silver--but it was also the Romans who first discovered that there were good reasons not to drink from lead vessels. Observe the pallid color of lead workers and see how the "vigor of their blood" was destroyed by the fumes from casting lead, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio commanded. In his foundational work of classical architecture, De Architectura, the only architecture manual to survive from antiquity--in which he derived architectural aesthetics from a consideration of the human body, leading to one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most famous paintings to be called "The Vitruvian body"--Vitrivius argued that there was a relationship between how to build cities and houses and how to build bodies, and it therefore followed that we should keep lead out of both bodies. "Water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes," he writes, "if we are desirous that it should be wholesome."

Didn't know this. (from Naked Capitalism)