Lead

The period of the first employment of lead for transmitting water is unknown ; but the circumstance that it was condemned by Vitruvius, a Roman architect believed to have lived about nineteen hundred years ago, is evidence of its having at that time been long enough in use to furnish experience as the basis of its rejection as a material for aqueducts.*

*_{SERVICE-PIPES POR WATER E. N. HORSFORD, From the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1849}