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82PbLead207.2

Post-transition metal

Lead (Pb)

“Rome’s plumbing metal and the beating heart of every car battery — trusted for 6,000 years, until its poison forced the world to phase it out.”

View group 14 →View period 6 →

Atomic number82

Atomic mass207.2

Group14

Period6

BlockP-block

PhaseSolid

Electron structure

How its electrons are arranged

[Xe] 4f¹⁴ 5d¹⁰ 6s² 6p²

Shell 1

2e⁻

Shell 2

8e⁻

Shell 3

18e⁻

Shell 4

32e⁻

Shell 5

18e⁻

Shell 6

4e⁻

Computed from the aufbau principle, with known real-world exceptions applied automatically.

🎯 Exam focus

Questions to practise

Write your answer first, then check it against the notes above.

1What did the Romans build from lead that survives in the English word “plumber” and the symbol Pb, and which sweet lead salt did they stir into wine?

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

2Describe the lead and lead-dioxide plates and the electrolyte inside a lead-acid cell like the one under a bus bonnet.

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

3Give two encounters with lead shielding that a patient or radiographer has inside a hospital’s X-ray department.

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

4Using lead’s density and its heavy nucleus, explain why X-ray room doors and aprons are lead-lined rather than steel-lined.

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

5Write lead’s electron configuration, name its group, period and block, and give its valence electron count.

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

6Show how the Latin name plumbum lives on today in at least two modern words or symbols you can point to.

Build your answer from the electron structure, position and properties above — then compare it with the notes.

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The notes

About the element

Characteristics

A cumulative poison for which no safe level exists: lead quietly deposits in bone and brain, dulling children’s IQ and damaging nerves and blood formation — hence the bans on leaded petrol, lead paint and lead-soldered food cans.
Remarkably dense (11.34 g/cm³) yet soft, melting at only 327 °C — ordinary moulds suffice to cast battery grids, bullets and fishing weights.
Chemistry ruled by Pb²⁺ through the inert pair effect, plus insoluble armour: lead acetate is sweetly soluble, but the sulfate–chloride films that grow on the metal seal it so well that lead survives sulfuric acid for years — the secret of the car battery.
A champion radiation shield: its sheer bulk and heavy nucleus absorb X-rays and gamma rays, which is why radiology doors, walls and aprons are lead-lined.

Appearance

A soft, very dense, bluish-grey metal that takes a fingernail score and leaves a grey smear when rubbed on paper — graphite was once called “black lead”, which is why pencils are said to hold “lead” though they hold none. A fresh cut shines, but air quickly seals it under a dull, dark-grey oxide skin that protects the metal beneath.

Real world

Where you meet it

✦ Uses

Lead-acid batteries — the heavy heart of every bus, car, home IPS and battery-run easy-bike rickshaw in Bangladesh; each cell stacks Pb and PbO₂ plates in sulfuric acid, and batteries remain the metal’s biggest use worldwide.
Radiation shielding: the lead-lined doors and walls of hospital X-ray rooms, the heavy apron draped over patients, and the pots that carry radioactive sources.
Weights and sheathing: wheel-balancing weights, fishing-net sinkers, crane counterweights, undersea-cable sheaths and the sheet-lead flashing tinners hammer into roofs.
Retired glories: white-lead house paint and tetraethyl lead in petrol sold freely for decades before science measured their cost — the textbook story of why chemical regulation exists.

◍ Everyday examples

The battery under a Dhaka bus’s bonnet and the four batteries under a village easy-bike are all lead-acid; garages buy the dead ones back for recycling.
Before any X-ray, the radiographer drapes a startlingly heavy lead apron over you — that very weight is the shield at work.
Flaking paint in pre-ban buildings and the soil around informal battery-recycling yards are today’s main routes by which Bangladeshi children ingest lead.

Story

History & name

Lead was among the very first metals humans smelted — soft, plentiful and easily won from its glittering ore galena — with artefacts reaching back some 6,000 years. Rome plumbed its cities with lead pipes (Latin plumbum, whence the symbol Pb and the word plumber) and even sweetened wine with “sugar of lead”, lead acetate. In the twentieth century tetraethyl lead was blended into petrol worldwide until its toll on children’s brains forced a global phase-out completed only in 2021 — around the same years that doctors were measuring lead poisoning in children living near Bangladesh’s battery-recycling yards.

Name originLatin plumbum — Rome’s pipe metal; the source of both the symbol Pb and the word plumber.