Excerpt from Lead Poisoning in the Smelting and Refining of Lead The last 15 or 20 years have seen great changes in the lead smelting industry of the United States. As transportation has improved, small and poorly equipped smelters which had been built near the deposits of ore have been abandoned and the tendency has been to concentrate the work of smelting and refining in a few large plants, for it has proved cheaper to ship the ore to large centers where labor is abundant, than to do the smelting in the mining districts. This change has resulted in a twofold advantage to the worker. In the first place, as these large plants are usually equipped with the latest and best machinery the amount of handwork required has been materially diminished. In the second place, the conditions under which the employees work have been improved, for large, well-built factories are usually freer from dust and fumes than are those of the old type, and newer methods of manufacture involve economies, such as the saving of poisonous volatile products which used to be allowed to escape into the air. Along with the improvement in equipment, there has been in recent years evidence of a greater interest on the part of the managers in the health and safety of their workmen, and there is probably now no plant in the United States in which some effort is not made to lessen the dangers of lead poisoning as well as to prevent accidents. As a result of these changes in most places where lead smelting is an old industry, as in southeastern Missouri, Pueblo, Denver, Leadville, East Helena, Omaha, and South Chicago, the opinion is general among physicians and townspeople, as well as among the men in the industry, that lead poisoning is far less frequent and less severe than it used to be. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.