Rome used lead on a scale nothing before it approached. Water was carried in lead pipes; the Latin plumbum gives both the chemical symbol Pb and the English word plumber, whose original trade was working lead. Roofs were sheeted with it, ships' hulls were sheathed with it, and it was cast into weights, seals and coffins.
It also went into food. Grape must boiled down in lead vessels produced a syrup called sapa or defrutum, used to sweeten and preserve wine, and the sweetness was partly lead acetate, which is genuinely sweet and is called sugar of lead. Roman recipes specify lead or lead-lined vessels for the purpose.
Whether this poisoned the Roman elite badly enough to matter historically is a real and unsettled argument, and it should be presented as one. Skeletal lead levels in Roman remains are elevated compared with earlier populations. Sediment cores from the harbour at Ostia indicate that Roman tap water carried substantially more lead than the local spring water. Against that, running water deposits scale inside pipes which limits leaching; Roman writers including Vitruvius explicitly warned that lead workers looked unhealthy and recommended clay pipes instead; and the claim that lead poisoning caused the decline of the empire rests on a chain of inference the evidence does not carry. The exposure was real and substantial; the historical consequence is contested.
Lead's usefulness continued through paint, where lead white was the finest white pigment available to painters from antiquity until the twentieth century and lead compounds made paint durable; through type metal; through glazes; and through the lead-acid battery, invented by Gaston Plante in 1859, which is still in nearly every vehicle on the road and accounts for the great majority of lead consumption today.