During the industrial revolution taking place in the late 1880s and the early part of the 1900′s asbestos was widely used as a building material. The term asbestos actually refers to six minerals which occur naturally in nature,these minerals are chrysotile,amosite,crocidolite,tremolite,anthophyllite and actinolite. These asbestos minerals are composed of a fibrous material that was found to have many industrial uses. Because of its fibrous nature,asbestos was very strong. It also worked well as insulation and its sound proofing qualities made it an excellent building insulation material. It was also hard to damage making it an ideal product for use around electricity,heat,and chemical,it also became widely used as a fire retardant and was used for wiring insulation.
The fibrous quality of asbestos allowed it be spun in to a cloth like material that could be manufactured into sheets making it easy to install and use,this combined with the fact that it is flexible,fairly inexpensive,strong and somewhat impervious to damage and it’s easy to see why it can into such widespread usage. It was used for a variety of function like housing shingles,ship building,electrical insulation,fire retardant coating,bricks,drywall,flooring,roofs,brake pads,clutch disks and furniture. Its potential seemed almost unlimited at the time.
Problems with asbestos first became apparent in the early 1900s but it took awhile to piece all the fact together. The first documented asbestos related death was reported in 1906 and it slowly became apparent that there was an unnaturally high rate of lung problems and early deaths in towns where asbestos was mined. The UK was a little quicker in seeing the correlation between asbestos and in 1924 the UK made the first diagnosis of asbestosis,which is when asbestos fibers get inhaled and trapped in the lungs causing a permanent and irreversible damage. People subjected to long term asbestos exposure suffer from breathing problems,lung cancer,mesothelioma and a host of other potential health risks.
During the 1930s the UK identified asbestosis as a work related disease and they started instituting work safety regulations such as requiring better ventilation. The US was about 10 years behind the UK,but eventually the US began to acknowledge the health risks associated with asbestos. Amazingly,Kent cigarettes actually used asbestos in its micronite filter;these filters were in use from 1952-1956. It boggles the mind to think how this could possibly slip through the cracks when the health risks of asbestos were becoming fairly well established at this point. The best part of this story has to be the fact that the Kent cigarette manufactures were one of the first to introduce filters in an effort to reduce the risks of smoking after an expose in Reader’s Digest published in 1952 that was titled “Cancer by the Carton”. Talk about irony.