Ad for asbestos place mats. The company delivers to the whole continent, so don’t feel left out of the cancer fun, Canada and Mexico! The company, founded 1858, went bankrupt in 1982 after asbestos claim payouts. The branding was later purchased, and still exists, now selling asbestos-free products.
The heat resistance of asbestos has been known for thousands of years, but the severe health issues only began to be realized around 1898, led by doctors in the UK. Even then, these matters are not like flipping a switch. It wasn’t until the 1920s that much headway was made to regulate it in the UK. The US was slow out of the gate and took another 10 years to follow suit.
For quite a while, there were many consumer products proudly touting their asbestos content, from stove liners to place mats to tea kettles. Most, but not all, countries now have bans in place to eliminate citizen exposure.
Here is an ad for asbestos wiring, showing a vintage movie projection room in Portland, OR.
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Asbestos really was kind of a wonder-material.
It’s cheap to pull out of the ground, it’s a phenomenal insulator for heat and entirely fireproof.
The only downside is that it’s also really good at giving people lung cancer.
They’re like tiny needles, and us humans only really have the nose as a filter to protect our lungs - once anything gets in there that can’t be absorbed via the alveoli, well shiiit - now you got needles in your lungs forever.
We should find alien life that is resistant to it and sell them all our asbestos.
I agree. There are quite a few materials like that I suppose. Lead is another. It has some amazingly useful properties, but it also happens to be a neurotoxin and you don’t want any of it inside you.
I have a stain on my table from a hot dish. Really expensive to fix (it’s a white ring, and the whole huge oak table would need stripped and refinished, since a spot-fix apparently wouldn’t work, due to the near mirror-finish on the thing).
If only I’d considered in advance that I could have given my dinner guests cancer to avoid this whole situation. Hindsight, I guess, sigh.
Well, live and learn. Next time you’ll know!
It’s kind of scary to imagine living in that time and using all these products (or even worse, being a worker in an asbestos factory) cause you have no way to know this stuff causes cancer. I wonder what kind of extremely unhealthy things we are exposed to right now just because we don’t know.
imagine living in that time
Unfortunaltely, asbestos is far from obsolete. Despite all the knowledge we have, it’s still mined, processed, sold and used in many countries of the world. In 2025 alone it was close to one million tons of new asbestos, with Russia alone contributing around 300 thousand tons.
https://asbestosawarenesscourse.org.uk/blog/global-asbestos-statistics
Living in an asbestos mining town was probably even worse. You can find video of people in the 1950s living in Asbestos, QC, wiping the dust off their cars before going to work at the mine. People have long known it was dangerous, still the companies like Johns Manville couldn’t be arsed to invest in masks, ventilation and other security measures.
It’s still widely used in developing countries, notably India, China, Indonesia etc…
I like that ASBESTOS is in spooky writing
Yea I was gonna say they chose a pretty nasty looking font for such a nasty substance haha
AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. - Cory Doctorow
Canada left out? Where do you think the Asbestos came from? 💀
