Close up of asbestos panels on west façade of building 711, looking east-northeast. Oakland Naval Supply Center, Warehouse Type D, Maritime Street at Seventh Avenue, Oakland, Alameda County, California. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
During a scene in Victor Fleming’s 1939 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow fall under the spell of the Wicked Witch while heading toward the Emerald City. A field of poppies appears before them, and as they travel through it, Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, as well as Dorothy’s terrier Toto, are overcome with drowsiness, falling asleep amongst the flowers. A panicked Scarecrow and Tin Man then call upon Glenda, the Good Witch, who creates a counterspell, sending snow flurries from above, waking the characters from their slumber.
The “magic” snow created for this scene by production designers was likely a “magic mineral”: chrysotile asbestos. Asbestos, a silicate mineral known for its flexible and fireproof characteristics, was so ubiquitous in the film industry that it made its way into not only the snow on the Wizard of Oz set as well as other films of the era, but stuffed into the costume worn by the Scarecrow, portrayed by actor Ray Bolger.
Asbestos wasn’t just on film screens in the 1930s; it was everywhere in the real world for another several decades, and in abundance until education and societal changes around the health of the public evolved to acknowledge its harm, and agencies began creating policies around limiting its use. Asbestos-containing materials were in schools, at work, and at home. They were a part of both the process of manufacturing and present during the labor of production. Asbestos was inside and outside buildings, in building materials, finishes, and adhesives. Asbestos was in electrical systems, in ships, in trains, and in automobiles. It was in commercial products. There were asbestos brake pads, and asbestos-containing materials were in hair dryers and toasters and woven into dishcloths. Asbestos was used to filter beer and sodas during the manufacturing process. Asbestos was sprayed on the outside of the World Trade Center, and it was used to filter cigarettes.
Asbestos is a name for six different fibrous minerals that occur naturally in specific types of rock. The six types of fibrous minerals—actinolite, anthophyllite, amosite, chrysotile, crocidolite, and tremolite—are classified into two categories: serpentine and amphibole. Five out of the six types of asbestos fall under the amphibole type, meaning they have straight, needle-shaped fibers. Only one—chrysotile—with its sheets of curly, fibrous crystals, falls within the serpentine variety. It’s the serpentine chrysotile variety, with its soft, fibrous structure and pliability, that established asbestos as a material that could be used to strengthen human-made items. Natural asbestos can be acquired by breaking the mineral free from the surrounding rock.
Yet, it was a resistance to flame that made it valuable. As soon as humans began to use fire for heat, light, power, and for manufacturing, they began losing things to its unpredictable, uncontrollable nature. Asbestos, used for nearly four thousand years, provided an opportunity to mitigate losses from fire, but it also created opportunities to use fire as a tool in a more exacting manner. Use of asbestos to strengthen ceramic wares began in the Stone Age and continued to advance as humans determined that asbestos could be used to make lamps burn more efficiently or to control what parts of a human body could be preserved during cremation. In Ancient Rome, the six priestesses of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, watched over a sacred fire that perpetually burned due to the presence of an asbestos wick.1 Inhabitants of what is now Greece began to construct homes of stone and asbestos, and using asbestos as an ingredient in stucco and whitewash.2
Image from the Johns-Manville Corporation’s Farm Ideas Book, which offered products for farms made of asbestos, 1942. Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
The modern English word “asbestos” as a noun has Greek linguistic origins, meaning, roughly, “inextinguishable.” In the first century, the Greek geographer Strabo described a quarry where asbestos was mined and then turned into flame resistant cloth items.3 The Roman emperor Charlemagne had a tablecloth woven of asbestos that he would clean by tossing it into a roaring fire, to the astonishment of his dinner guests.4
The Industrial Revolution supercharged an interest in refining and processing asbestos. Growing countries, like the United States, experienced a social and economic shift from agrarian life to one that was centered around an expanding network of villages, towns, and cities. Asbestos powered technological innovations in transportation that brought the raw materials to cities that allowed them to grow both larger and taller. By the mid-nineteenth century, both the railroad and shipping industries had found uses for asbestos as an insulating material, and the plastics and rubber industries were using asbestos as a material to strengthen their products.
Cities of the early nineteenth century were plagued by fire, which destroyed both individual structures and engulfed whole neighborhoods. Newly developed construction techniques, such as Balloon Framing, a method of construction developed in Chicago where machine cut predimensional lumber formed the walls of a structure, allowed buildings to be constructed quickly. Yet, wood walls—as well as wood shingles—burned quickly.
H. W. Johns’ patent Asbestos materials catalog, 1877. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
Workers apply H.W. John’s patent asbestos roofing. From H.W. Johns’ patent Asbestos materials catalog, 1877. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
In 1868, the H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company of New York City secured a patent for a roofing material made of asbestos and Portland cement.5 This material, the company claimed, did not conduct heat, and was impervious to sparks and cinders. Other patents followed for bricks made of asbestos, and for asbestos insulation. In 1901, the H.W. Johns Manufacturing Company merged with the Manville Covering Company of Wisconsin, and by 1929 the Johns-Manville Corporation had asbestos mines and plants all over the country and was selling its products through branch houses located in every major United States city and in Canada. The Johns-Manville Corporation manufactured and sold a range of specialized building materials made of asbestos. For the theater industry, the corporation sold fireproof booths to house film projection equipment, and curtains made of a material named “Vitrabestos” that satisfied fire regulations established by many cities at the turn of the twentieth century that required theaters be outfitted with a fireproof curtain across the stage.6 To the farm industries, the Johns-Manville Corporation marketed “Asbestos Flexboard,” a rodent-proof wall material that in addition to being fireproof could maintain the sanitary conditions necessary for both a dairy barn and milk house.7
Materials made with asbestos were utilized in both the construction of new buildings and the renovation of older ones. A trade catalog, titled 101 Practical Suggestions for Home Improvements
published by Johns-Manville Corporation in 1936, illustrates the use of asbestos shingles to reclad older buildings. These asbestos shingles, given the proprietary name “Cedargrain” by Johns-Manville took on the appearance of wood and were designed to emulate different styles of traditional wood shingles. “Cedargrain” shingles had realistic wood grain and were tapered to emulate even the shadow lines of a wood shingle. New asbestos shingles, Johns-Manville claimed, could be installed directly over a building’s existing siding.8
Colors and blends of Johns-Manville asphalt shingles, which all contained asbestos, 1935. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
To decorate the home, asbestos cement sheet was available in a variety of stylish, contemporary colors and textures that reflected the influence of streamlined, modern design as a commercialized style. Asbestos cement sheet could also be embossed to emulate the texture of tile or stone. Purchased in large sections, asbestos cement sheet could be cut to fit an area with a handsaw, and the seams could be covered with chromium strips for a more decorative, streamline finish. Quickly installed and waterproof, asbestos cement sheet could be utilized all over the home, from kitchens to bathrooms. Like asbestos shingles, asbestos cement sheet could be installed on top of existing materials, making it a convenient material to renovate older buildings.
“A modern kitchen with walls of J-M decorative asbestos Flexboard in green and buff.” Image from the Johns-Mansville Corporation’s 101 Practical Suggestions for Home Improvements, offering asbestos cement sheet for kitchen design, 1936. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
“A modern bathroom with walls of J-M asbestos wainscoting.” Image from the Johns-Mansville Corporation’s 101 Practical Suggestions for Home Improvements, offering asbestos cement sheet for bathroom design, 1936.. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
By the late 1930s, the Johns-Manville Corporation was so successful that the company had a presence at the 1939 New York World’s Fair held at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. The Johns-Manville Building commissioned Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building, to design an art deco pavilion for the fair that would showcase the company’s products.
To decorate the building’s exterior, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon worked with muralist Hildreth Meière, who designed other murals and sculptures at the fair, including at the AT&T Building, the Temple of Religion, and the Medicine and Public Health, Science and Education Building Complex. In 1931 Meière designed an Art Deco reception room for the Irving Trust and Bank Company at One Wall Street, in New York City, using gold and red tiles, and framed with metallic, streamlined doorways and windows. For the Johns-Manville Building entrance façade, Hildreth Meière designed a low relief mixed-media sculpture of a human figure in a suit made of asbestos. The figure is powerfully posed, with one foot on a stack of pipes. The figure is holding back a swirling array of metal flames. The stylistic text reads “Asbestos” on one side of the figure, while the other reads “The Magic Mineral.”
John-Manville Building under construction, New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, 1939. © International Hildreth Meière Association, Inc.
John-Manville Building unveiling, New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, 1939. © International Hildreth Meière Association, Inc.
John-Manville Building detail, New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, 1939. © International Hildreth Meière Association, Inc.
The totality of asbestos use nearing the mid-twentieth century invites an inquiry beyond what asbestos was in, but what it wasn’t in. In addition to serving as an insulating material, asbestos did not conduct electricity, making it the ideal material to coat the wires and insulation of electrical systems as electricity became more prevalent as a power source.
In the design and construction of modern steel-framed buildings, like the World Trade Center, asbestos was a lightweight fireproofing material used on the exterior and interior. Known as “sprayed mineral fiber,” asbestos was blended with binders and water, and applied via a spray gun. With its ability to bond directly to steel surfaces and metal lath and its lightweight characteristics, US-based architecture firms used it on projects across the country.9
Like other trades associated with architecture, engineering, and construction, asbestos workers had their own union. The American Federation of Labor established the Asbestos Workers as a national union around 1900. The union chose to align themselves with the salamander as an expression of the profession, which during its early years represented laborers who primarily worked to install asbestos around equipment to heat, cool, or power construction projects. Until the 1960s, union representation primarily involved fair practices around collective bargaining and benefits. Protocols involving working conditions and safety standards were concerned with preventing workplace injuries, but not the unique health hazards that asbestos presented.
Yet, the understanding that asbestos carried health hazards is nearly as old as its human use. Roman historians observed that people enslaved in the labor of extracting the raw material from the asbestos mines seemed to die young.10 At the turn of the twentieth century, a medical term was created to describe a specific type of inflammation and scarring of the lungs in patients that had been exposed to large quantities of asbestos over long periods of time, a condition occurring in workers that were working with asbestos directly, known as pulmonary asbestosis. By the 1930s, doctors had identified pulmonary asbestosis as an occupational disease that attacked the lungs of workers in asbestos textile factories, disabling them, and ultimately causing death.11 The emergence of pulmonary asbestosis led Great Britain to regulate the asbestos industry as early as 1931, but as global manufacturing increased in the years leading up to and during World War II, the mining of asbestos intensified. Once the war effort concluded, however, a global oversupply of asbestos created circumstances where manufacturers were faced with an overabundance of raw materials, creating a need to determine new ways that asbestos could be integrated into building materials and commercial goods.
In 1952, the Lorillard Tobacco Company found an innovative way to use surplus asbestos. The company’s Kent Cigarettes had a “Micronite” cigarette filter, a mix of crimped crepe paper and asbestos.
The post-World War II housing boom supplied a use for building materials that could be prefabricated, which provided manufacturers like the Johns-Manville Corporation with an opportunity to supply the construction industry with products like vinyl asbestos tiles. Vinyl asbestos tile came in playful primary colors, or could resemble wood, glazed tile, or marble. Tiles could be manufactured with specks of glitter or aggregate or have a multi-dimensional finish. Companies like Johns-Manville developed creative portmanteaus for their asbestos inventions like “Cemesto,” “Colorbestos,” “Zonolite,” and “Asbestone” to individualize their products, but also to highlight the modernity and technical innovation that they represented. The health hazards of asbestos, however, became difficult for the industry—or the public—to ignore.
A selection of asbestos tiles offered by the Congolium-Nairn Company, 1957. From the collection of the Association for Preservation Technology Building Heritage Library.
While asbestos fibers can be lodged into the skin or ingested, the primary route of asbestos entry into the body is through the respiratory system. When airborne asbestos fibers are inhaled, the sharp fibers become lodged in the tissues of the lungs. Workers who had been exposed to asbestos, particularly in the shipbuilding industries during World War II, were being diagnosed with Mesothelioma, a cancer that forms around the lungs and abdominal organs. Asbestos exposure is the most common cause of Mesothelioma, which was also affecting workers in the construction and demolition industries. Companies that manufactured asbestos containing products, like Johns-Manville, fought the growing public awareness of the threat of asbestos to workers through aggressive public relations campaigns by way of organizations that they themselves created, including the Asbestos Information Association, an industry trade group that presented misinformation on asbestos, and published medical literature that downplayed the harms of asbestos exposure.12
By the early 1970s, the health hazards of asbestos was a significant concern within the newly formed US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Beginning in 1973, the EPA began regulating uses of asbestos. In 1973, the agency banned spray applied asbestos for fireproofing and insulating purposes, like the kind used on the World Trade Center during its initial phases of construction.13 In 1975, the EPA banned the installation of asbestos pipe and block insulation on boilers and hot water tanks. Federal regulations continued to tighten around the asbestos industry until 1989, when the EPA attempted to ban most asbestos-containing products. In 1991, that regulation was overruled, and as a result, the 1989 ban only prohibited new uses of asbestos in products initiated for the first time after that year.14
Like many technological innovations, the benefits of asbestos and its omnipresence in building materials and modern life rose until they were eclipsed by the harm that they caused, creating a public backlash that led to sweeping regulatory change. Despite this, asbestos still exists in situ in buildings across the United States that were built and renovated before the 1980s and beyond. While regulations have severely limited the production of materials containing asbestos and commercial asbestos products have been discontinued, asbestos has never been completely banned in the United States, joining China, Russia, India, and Canada, who also permit some uses of asbestos. Asbestos is still used to manufacture chlorine and sodium hydroxide, chemicals used to disinfect wastewater.
In 1986, Ray Bolger, the actor that played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, whose costume was stuffed with asbestos, died of bladder cancer. While many factors might have contributed to Bolger’s diagnosis, there is a link between occupational asbestos exposure and the specific cancer that cause Bolger’s death.15
The known threats of asbestos have caused consumers a level of anxiety about where it is and what to do with it and has also created an industry out of its abatement. To learn more about asbestos from the perspective of a professional who works with asbestos, the author spoke to an environmental engineer and their technicians, who all wished to remain anonymous.
“The biggest misconception I see is that asbestos isn’t used anymore,” the environmental engineer shared in an email interview. “Most of the bans that the government tried to push in the late 1970s and early 1980s never went through, as lobbyists worked to get them overturned.” They continue: “It wasn’t until March 2024, when the Biden-Harris administration prohibited the manufacture, import, processing, and distribution of asbestos.”16 That 2024 ban, the final rule to prohibit ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos, the environmental engineer shares, had a twelve-year phase out period that the current Trump-Vance administration is trying to take apart.
On March 18, 2024, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced a final rule to ban ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos, the only known form of asbestos currently used or imported into the United States. “Exposure to asbestos is known to cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer, and it is linked to more than 40,000 deaths in the US each year,” stated an EPA press release announcing the ban.17 In July 2025, the Trump administration withdrew a plan to rewrite the 2024 ban adopted by the Biden administration a year earlier; yet, even with the ban in place, it allows some manufacturers of asbestos-containing products to phase them out over twelve years.
Yet asbestos is, and will always be, everywhere. The totality of asbestos is further emphasized by way of the fact that asbestos comes naturally from the earth, and it was mined across the United States and the world. “Asbestos is in the environment around you. I can go to state parks that have exposed asbestos seems,” states the environmental engineer, who also points out that asbestos is also in the earth’s soil.
Regardless of the political climate, the EPA as an agency sets different requirements for building types, from schools to single-family homes to workplaces. Regulations for asbestos handling, removal, and disclosure vary from state to state. Yet, it remains everywhere, including in newer buildings, shares the environmental engineer: “the EPA has no cutoff date for when you need to do an inspection prior to a renovation or demolition, since asbestos still can be used.” They continue, “If you renovate a five-year-old building, you still need an asbestos inspection.”
In terms of inspecting asbestos-containing materials, environmental engineers follow ASTM International testing standards, which set voluntary consensus protocols for environmental and engineering services. They also take into account what kind of federal, state, or agency laws are in effect that may dictate specifics in terms of testing, and what percentage of asbestos is legally allowable per building, or measurable unit of building material. To test a material for asbestos, environmental engineers take a quarter size sample of a building material, while noting the quantity of the material and where it is present in or on the building. That sample is sent to a lab to confirm the presence of asbestos, and if present, what percentage of that material contains the mineral.
The condition of materials containing asbestos is critical in determining what level of harm the asbestos within it could cause, and whether enclosure or encapsulation is the best past forward for addressing them. Asbestos poses the greatest health hazard in a friable state, meaning that once it is crushed or crumbled, its sharp, thin minerals pose the largest risk, as those materials could become airborne. Methods of enclosure will wrap the friable material inside—or under—an air-tight barrier. To encapsulate asbestos, a coating, liquid sealant, or another barrier is placed on top of the asbestos, therefore covering it.
Vinyl asbestos tiles, one of the most popular asbestos-containing commercial products for more than a half century, are frequently encapsulated using modern vinyl composition tile one of the most well-known, affordable, and accessible encapsulation techniques.
In some situations where asbestos is present on property owned or regulated by a governmental agency, such as a public school, distinct Federal requirements are in place to abate asbestos, particularly during renovation or demolition.
In terms of building materials, professionals, like the environmental engineer, know what materials are suspected of containing asbestos, so they know what to look for during an inspection. Members of the public with some knowledge of asbestos containing materials, according to the environmental engineer, can also spot asbestos. “Once you become familiar with the materials, it becomes repetitive, as some materials are known, and you can tell asbestos fibers based on how they look, as they look very different from other fibers.”
It’s the fibrous nature of asbestos-containing products that make many of them visually identifiable. In some products, like asbestos cement sheet, or “popcorn”-textured ceilings and tiles, the asbestos was used to provide a textural dimension to the surface. If an asbestos-containing product is in good condition, removal may not be the best option, as the cracking, breaking, or otherwise disturbing of products containing asbestos during the process to remove them is what makes them dangerous. At any scale, asbestos removal requires complex containment, disposal, and worker safety protocols.
Asbestos removal, Chicago, 2012. Videos by David Schalliol.
Facing a growing number of class action lawsuits based on occupational asbestos exposure, the Johns-Manville Company filed for bankruptcy in 1982 after decades of disseminating information to its employees that downplayed the harm of asbestos. Like all but one of the buildings constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair, the Art Deco Johns-Manville Building is no longer extant. Like so many buildings constructed during that time, it likely contained asbestos.
For over a hundred years, asbestos helped architects, engineers, and designers build the world of tomorrow. Yet, what the future would ultimately hold for asbestos was one of regret; that its material prevalence outweighed the benefits the innovators ever hoped to achieve.
There is a paradox that asbestos presents. While the spectrum of public education, opinion, and policy change has led to a universal understanding that asbestos is harmful, it took a long time for that spectrum to shift. Before it did, asbestos was used in abundance, and across manufacturing and commercial goods. New products and technologies are introduced into the consumer market on a regular basis, and in many cases, like asbestos, we won’t know of their harms to human health or wellbeing until their use makes us sick.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the International Hildreth Meière Association, the Association for Preservation Technology Building Technology Heritage Library, and the environmental engineer and their staff who lent their professional expertise to this column.
