Eternit, Asbestos Cement, and what was Known as of 1918: If this Article Doesn’t Get You Upset, Nothing Will. The Power of Toxicdocs.org

I generally love “new to me” asbestos history, especially when it is global. This particular paper addressed and organized issues that you need to read to believe.

Let’s start at the beginning. While researching some asbestos issues using Toxicdocs.org, I ran across a 2005 paper focusing on asbestos cement and Eternit which is translated into English, and that is freely available to download. The document is entitled “The tragedy of asbestos: Eternit and the consequences of a hundred years of asbestos cement” by R. F. Ruers and N. Schouten, and translated into English by Steven P. McGiffen. You can find a copy of the article either at Toxicdocs.org or at https://theasbestosblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2005-Eternit-from-Toxicdocs.pdf.

For those of you who do not know about Toxicdocs.org, you are missing out on an amazing research resource hosted by Columbia University, with both primary and secondary source documents. If you are at all into history, I recommend that you take a quick trip around this website at https://www.toxicdocs.org/. As an example, for my last thesis, I found a Purchase Order from Johns-Manville to Cape Asbestos in the 1970s that included the sale and shipment of blue asbestos from South Africa to Waukegan, Illinois. The purchase order included pricing, quantities, etc. Such primary source documents from the asbestos companies are very difficult to track down without such a repository.

To understand the scope of the Eternit article, the Contents and the Forward are as following:

The introduction included historical information, such as the invention of asbestos cement around 1900 by Austrian Ludwig Hatschek. Hatschek then licensed his patented invention to typically one company in each country, many of which used the Eternit name. These companies soon became the largest processors of asbestos.

Interestingly, the major international companies during the 1960s formed TEAM, under which companies would be formed in Asia. TEAM eventually became wholly owned by Eternit Belgium. Interestingly, that included Eternit Belgium owning Eternit Inc. in the United States. I have to admit that this was a new one on me; that is, I didn’t know that Eternit Belgium did business in the United States, either directly or through subsidiaries.

The article has some pretty detailed support showing that dangers about asbestos were known early on. This includes the claim that in 1918, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics:

“went so far as to publish a book which noted that a number of major American and Canadian life insurance firms were refusing to sell any further policies to asbestos workers, whom statistics had shown to suffer a high rate of premature death.”

Although the article does contain footnotes, this particular claim does not include a supporting citation, and so I need to follow up on that issue. To claim knowledge as of 1918 is about 10 years before the dozen lawsuits filed against Johns-Manville in New Jersey. To push the reasonably and publicly available knowledge back 10 years is really quite a claim and, in my opinion, requires citation to the primary source documents on which it must ultimately rely.

The article also claims that the Eternit asbestos companies used disinformation to keep the doctors, politicians, and customers from knowing the hazards as follows:

For these claims, footnotes in support are included.

I am curious what you think of this article. Let me know by leaving a comment or email me at TheAsbestosBlog@gmail.com.