Period 6 element "The Poisoner's Poison" and "Inheritance Powder" (alongside arsenic). Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb (from ) and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable other metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed to air. Lead has a shiny chrome-silver luster when it is melted into a liquid. Lead is used in building construction, lead-acid batteries, bullets and shots, weights, as part of solders, pewters, fusible alloys and
Atomic number in a defined environment on Earth, determines the element's standard atomic weight. Historically, it was these atomic weights of elements (in comparison to hydrogen) that were the quantities measurable by chemists in the 19th century. The conventional symbol "Z" comes from the German word meaning "number", which, before the modern synthesis of ideas from chemistry and physics, merely denoted an element's numerical place in the periodic table, whose order is approximately, but not completely, consistent with the order of the elements by atomic weights. Only after 1915, with the suggestion and evidence that this "Z" number was also the nuclear