Asbestos: Types, Uses, History, and Health Effects

Asbestos is a commercial and regulatory name for six naturally occurring minerals that share one dangerous trait: they grow as masses of thin, separable fibers, fine enough to be breathed deep into the lungs. For most of the twentieth century, asbestos was used in thousands of products, from insulation and brake pads to floor tile and cement pipe. All six types cause serious disease, including mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the lungs or abdomen), lung cancer, and asbestosis (permanent scarring of the lungs),¹ and the industry knew it long before the public did. Asbestos is now banned or restricted across much of the world, but it remains in millions of older buildings, and people are still being diagnosed with asbestos diseases today from exposures that happened decades ago.

If you or a family member has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, or asbestosis, call 833-4-ASBESTOS to find out whether you have a claim.

What asbestos is

Asbestos isn't one mineral. It's a regulatory label for six minerals that all grow, under the right conditions, as long, thin, separable fibers, the form geologists call "asbestiform."² One of the six, chrysotile, is the curly-fibered "serpentine" type, and it accounts for about 96% of all the asbestos mined and used worldwide between 1900 and 2003.³ The other five, crocidolite, amosite, tremolite, actinolite, and anthophyllite, are straight-fibered "amphiboles." All six cause the same diseases, and there's no safe type and no safe level of exposure to any of them.¹

The six differ in chemistry, color, history, and how potent they are fiber for fiber. For the full breakdown of how they compare, why the fibers behave so differently, and the detail on each, see the six types of asbestos.

Asbestos was everywhere, and the industry knew

For most of the last century, asbestos was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It insulated homes, schools, ships, and power plants, lined the brakes on every car, reinforced the pipe that carried drinking water, and hid inside floor tile, ceiling tile, joint compound, and household appliances. By the late 1950s it had been built into about 3,000 different products,³ and avoiding it was nearly impossible.

The scale is hard to picture. At its peak around 1977, the world was producing almost 4.8 million metric tons of asbestos a year,⁴ more than ten billion pounds of fiber mined, processed, and built into the world in a single year. The fibers themselves are almost unimaginably fine. A single chrysotile fibril averages about 0.025 micrometers across (a micrometer is a millionth of a meter),² so a human hair, which runs 20 to 180 micrometers wide,⁵ is hundreds to thousands of times thicker. Laid side by side, it would take roughly a million chrysotile fibrils to span a single inch. Those invisible fibers are what made asbestos so useful, and what make it so deadly.

The hardest part of the story is that the companies knew. By the 1930s, Johns-Manville, the largest asbestos manufacturer in the US, was quietly settling lawsuits from workers dying of asbestosis and keeping the disease out of public view.⁶ As the evidence of cancer mounted through the following decades, the industry's instinct was to bury it rather than publish. The public wouldn't fully understand the danger for years, and by then the fiber was everywhere.

Why asbestos was used

Asbestos was used for over a century because nothing else could match its combination of properties at anything close to its price. And the cruel logic of asbestos is that the same properties that made it useful are what make it deadly.

It doesn't burn, so it became the default for fireproofing and insulation. Its fibers are, pound for pound, among the strongest materials known, so it reinforced cement, plaster, and plastic. It resists acids and seawater, so it lasted in harsh industrial settings. It's flexible enough to be woven into cloth. And it was cheap and abundant, found on every inhabited continent. When a single material is fireproof, strong, chemically tough, weavable, and cheap, the pressure to use it everywhere is overwhelming.

But every one of those traits has a dark twin. Fibers strong enough to reinforce concrete are strong enough to pierce lung tissue. Fibers that survive boiling acid survive for decades inside the body, where the immune system can't break them down. Fibers thin enough to weave are thin enough to be breathed into the smallest airways and lodge there permanently. The very things that made asbestos irreplaceable in industry are what make it cause cancer.

What asbestos was used in

Because it was cheap and did so many things, asbestos went into an enormous range of products, reaching into nearly every industry and most of the home. The biggest uses were thermal insulation (pipe and boiler covering, block insulation, spray-on fireproofing), asbestos-cement building materials (siding, roofing, wallboard, and water pipe), floor tile, roofing felts, friction products (brake and clutch linings), textiles, gaskets and packings, and joint compound. Most exposure happened not when these products sat in place but when workers and homeowners cut, sanded, installed, repaired, or tore them out, releasing the fibers into the air.

For a fuller picture of the products that contained asbestos and the trades that worked with them, see our guide to asbestos-containing products and the occupations most affected by asbestos.

Where the word "asbestos" comes from

The word carries an irony that fits the material. "Asbestos" comes from a Greek word meaning "unquenchable" or "inextinguishable," but it started as a mistake. The Greeks didn't use that word for the fiber at all. Their name for it was amiantos, meaning "undefiled" or "pure," because cloth woven from it could be thrown into a fire and come out clean. The word "asbestos" originally referred to quicklime, a different and dangerously reactive substance. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder mixed the two up, and over the centuries the wrong name is the one that stuck in English. The Greeks' original word survives in the Romance languages, where asbestos is still amiante in French and amianto in Italian and Spanish, from the Greek for "undefiled."⁸

How asbestos fibers cause injury

Asbestos causes disease through a single underlying problem: the body can't get rid of the fibers. Most dust and debris that reaches the lungs is dissolved, coughed up, or swept away within days. Asbestos is different. The fibers are mineral (chemically durable, sharp, and effectively insoluble), and once they lodge deep in the lung they can stay there for the rest of a person's life. The harm comes not from a single toxic event but from decades of low-grade injury, as the body tries again and again to clear something it was never built to remove.⁹

Fibers that can't be cleared

When asbestos-laden air is breathed in, the long, thin fibers travel deepest, slipping past the airway's natural defenses into the small bronchioles and air sacs where oxygen crosses into the blood. The lung's first responders are macrophages, scavenger cells that normally engulf and digest foreign particles. A macrophage can swallow a short fiber, but a long one is simply too big: the cell wraps around it, can't finish the job, and ends up stuck in a state often called "frustrated phagocytosis." The fiber isn't destroyed. Instead, the stalled cell spills its digestive chemicals into the surrounding tissue, the body sends more cells to the same spot, and the cycle repeats.⁹

How the damage accumulates

From there the injury proceeds along three reinforcing paths.

The first is mechanical. Because the fibers are rigid and needle-like, they physically scratch the tissue around them, and they can foul the machinery of cell division, cutting through the internal scaffolding that pulls chromosomes apart so that new cells inherit the wrong number of them. That kind of physical disruption is one route toward the genetic disorder that underlies cancer.

The second is chemical. Many asbestos fibers carry iron, built into the mineral itself in the amphibole varieties or picked up from the body in the case of chrysotile, and that iron drives reactions that throw off free radicals, reactive molecules that damage nearby DNA, proteins, and cell membranes. The macrophages besieging the fibers release still more of these molecules, leaving the surrounding tissue under constant chemical assault.

The third is inflammation. Because the fibers are never cleared, the immune response never stands down. Inflammatory signals keep summoning fresh cells, which generate more reactive molecules, which inflict more damage, which provokes still more inflammation, a self-sustaining loop that does much of the long-term harm on its own, more than the fiber alone.⁹

Injury, repair, and disease

Every round of injury is followed by repair, and over years that repair leaves its mark. Scar tissue builds up and stiffens the lung (the process behind asbestosis and pleural plaques) while the cells doing the repairing accumulate genetic errors with each division. When DNA damage outpaces accurate repair, a cell can die, scar, or, rarely but catastrophically, turn cancerous. Some fibers also migrate out of the lung to the pleura, the thin lining around it, where the same cycle of damage can give rise to mesothelioma.⁹

Which disease develops, and whether one develops at all, depends on how much asbestos a person breathed and for how long, and on the kind of fiber. A fiber's mineral type, length, and thickness decide how deep it travels, where it settles, and how stubbornly it resists the body's attempts to clear it.

Because the damage builds so slowly, asbestos disease usually surfaces 20 to 50 years after exposure,¹ which is why people exposed in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s are being diagnosed now. For how these diseases develop and what to watch for, see our page on asbestos-related diseases.

A history of asbestos

Asbestos has one of the longest histories of any material. For two thousand years it was prized as a marvel, a stone that could be woven into cloth and wouldn't burn, long before anyone built an industry on it. That industry, and the disease that came with it, belongs almost entirely to the twentieth century.

Asbestos before the modern industry: from ancient cloth to the Canadian trade

The ancient world

Asbestos had been worked for thousands of years before any written account survives (archaeologists have traced it in pottery and lamp wicks far older than Rome), but it was the Greek and Roman writers who left the first detailed descriptions, and they described it almost entirely as a textile. Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and Strabo all wrote of cloth woven from "stone-flax" that could be cleaned by throwing it into a fire and drawing it out brighter than before. Pliny records that such cloth was rare and costly, reserved for the funeral shrouds of kings and patricians, where it kept the ashes of the dead from mingling with the ashes of the pyre. Strabo and Plutarch both describe asbestos lamp wicks that never wore away, and the traveler Pausanias credited the sculptor Callimachus with a golden lamp for the temple of Athena on the Acropolis that needed oil only once a year. A scrap of Roman cremation cloth, recovered from a sarcophagus on the Via Praenestina in 1702, still survives in the Vatican Library.¹⁰

Play video: Did Pliny the Elder Think Asbestos Was a Plant? 5:28

Video · 5:28 Did Pliny the Elder Think Asbestos Was a Plant?

Play video: The Asbestos Funeral Cloth That Survived Mount Vesuvius 6:41

Video · 6:41 The Asbestos Funeral Cloth That Survived Mount Vesuvius

Play video: Ancient Greece’s Eternal Flame: The Asbestos Legend 3:17

Video · 3:17 Ancient Greece’s Eternal Flame: The Asbestos Legend

A medieval marvel

Through the Middle Ages asbestos nearly vanished from European industry and survived mostly as a story. Charlemagne, it's said, owned an asbestos tablecloth that he cleaned by tossing it into the hearth, mystifying guests who took the trick for magic. When Marco Polo encountered fireproof cloth on his travels through Central Asia in the late thirteenth century, locals told him the fibers came from the skin of the salamander, a lizard believed to live in fire. Polo doubted the tale, sought out the source, and left a description of how the mineral was actually quarried and prepared accurate enough to match the methods still used for long-fiber asbestos centuries later.¹⁰

Play video: Did Charlemagne Use an Asbestos Tablecloth? 4:32

Video · 4:32 Did Charlemagne Use an Asbestos Tablecloth?

Play video: Did Marco Polo Discover Asbestos in China? 4:40

Video · 4:40 Did Marco Polo Discover Asbestos in China?

A curiosity of the courts

In early modern Europe asbestos returned as a wonder of treasuries and learned societies. In 1676 a merchant displayed a handkerchief of incombustible "salamander's wool" before the Royal Society in London, and the imperial treasury in Vienna prized a similar woven napkin among its valuables. Naturalists began to study it in earnest. The Swedish mineralogist Axel Cronstedt catalogued asbestos in his 1758 System of Mineralogy, remarking that both its supply and its uses were small, while in the Russian Urals the Demidov family, industrialists favored by Peter the Great, spent decades of the early eighteenth century working asbestos into gloves, socks, and trinkets before limited demand and poor transport closed the venture.¹⁰

Play video: The Fireproof Asbestos Napkin That Fooled Europe’s Elite 2:54

Video · 2:54 The Fireproof Asbestos Napkin That Fooled Europe’s Elite

Play video: Benjamin Franklin’s Asbestos Purse: The Strange True Story 4:12

Video · 4:12 Benjamin Franklin’s Asbestos Purse: The Strange True Story

The first industry: Italy

Italy can fairly be called the cradle of the asbestos industry. Early in the nineteenth century an Italian noblewoman, Candida Lena Perpenti, had asbestos from the Valmalenco spun and woven into thread, cloth, and paper, and even into protective suits for firemen; by one account the Viceroy of Italy rewarded her with a pearl necklace for a pair of asbestos gloves. The mineral reached a wider industrial audience at the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, after which the asbestos veins of the Alps were prospected and exploited in earnest, largely by British firms. A Glasgow company formed in 1871 and a rival Italo-English company in Turin competed for control of the Italian deposits, on the then-common belief that Italian asbestos was the only variety worth having. In 1879 the principal interests merged to form the United Asbestos Company.¹⁰

Canada and the modern trade

That belief was overturned by Canada. Asbestos was found in the province of Quebec around the 1860s, near what became the great mining district of Thetford, though commercial mining didn't take hold until the late 1870s. Canadian chrysotile proved far easier to work by machine than the brittle Italian fiber, and because it lay within reach of the rapidly industrializing United States, it reshaped the entire trade. Without it, the American asbestos industry would have developed far more slowly. English manufacturers led the way in working the new fiber: John Bell, founder of Bell's Asbestos, perfected its spinning in collaboration with the Lancashire firm Turner Brothers, and the British Admiralty adopted asbestos packing for the Royal Navy. A cascade of mergers followed. Bell's and the United Asbestos Company combined in 1909, and over the following decades the business consolidated with Turner Brothers into Turner & Newall, by the 1930s the largest asbestos manufacturer in the world, and a name that would recur throughout the litigation of the century to come.¹⁰

Play video: The Asbestos Cat: The Strange Fireproof Mascot of Keasbey & Mattison 2:46

Video · 2:46 The Asbestos Cat: The Strange Fireproof Mascot of Keasbey & Mattison

The wartime boom

Demand grew steadily through the early twentieth century and then exploded during the Second World War, which poured asbestos of every kind into ships, planes, and military plants. Much of it was amosite, one of the more dangerous amphibole types, packed as insulation into the engine and boiler rooms of Navy vessels, where sailors and shipyard workers breathed it in tight, unventilated spaces.⁶

What the makers knew, and buried

By the time the war ended, the industry had reason to know asbestos did more than scar the lungs. Through the 1930s and 1940s a group of asbestos companies funded research at the Saranac Laboratory in upstate New York, meant to study asbestosis. Its director, Leroy Gardner, found instead that chrysotile induced malignant tumors in the mice he exposed to it, and he had logged lung-cancer cases among Quebec asbestos miners as well. The cancer findings were circulated privately among the companies' scientists but kept out of the published literature; a 1946 industry monograph that drew on Gardner's work left the cancer data out.¹¹

The open record didn't catch up until 1955, when the British epidemiologist Richard Doll, commissioned by a manufacturer whose own figures had looked reassuring, found a lung-cancer rate in long-term asbestos workers many times the expected level and published the result over the industry's objections.¹² The link between asbestos and lung cancer was now in the scientific literature, where it couldn't be buried.

The reckoning

Mesothelioma came next. In 1960 J.C. Wagner and his colleagues traced a cluster of the rare cancer to crocidolite exposure in South Africa, including in people who had only lived near the mines, and the finding turned asbestos from an occupational hazard into a public one.¹³ The lawsuits followed. In 1969 Clarence Borel, an insulation worker dying of mesothelioma, sued the manufacturers; the Fifth Circuit upheld the verdict in 1973,¹⁴ the same year US asbestos use hit its all-time peak of about 803,000 tons,⁴ and the decision opened the door to the flood of litigation that followed. By 1982 Johns-Manville had filed for bankruptcy under the weight of the claims, the first of the bankruptcies that would later fund the asbestos trusts.⁶

The long retreat

From there the industry never recovered. US asbestos use fell by more than 99 percent over the following decades.⁴ The EPA tried to ban it outright in 1989, only to have most of the rule struck down by the Fifth Circuit in 1991,¹⁵ which let limited uses continue for decades more. In 2024 the EPA finalized a narrower rule banning the last remaining uses of chrysotile,¹⁶ and that rule was promptly challenged: the same Fifth Circuit heard argument in mid-2026 (Texas Chemistry Council v. EPA), with a decision pending as this page was last reviewed. Few industrial materials have ever risen so high or fallen so far.

Why asbestos is still an issue today

It would be easy to assume that asbestos is an artifact from the past. It isn't.

It's still being mined. Global production has fallen sharply from its peak around 1977,⁴ but a few countries, led by Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and Brazil, still produce it and ship it mostly to the developing world, where it's built into the same products that once saturated American homes.¹⁷ The split is telling: the countries that have banned asbestos are the ones without a local asbestos mining and construction industry to protect.**

It's still in old buildings. The fiber installed across the twentieth century is still in millions of homes, schools, and workplaces, in old tile, siding, pipe, insulation, and joint compound. It becomes dangerous when it's disturbed, which is why renovation and demolition still cause exposure today.

It still turns up in consumer products. Talc and asbestos minerals like tremolite form in the same rock, so commercial talc can carry asbestos, a contamination documented at least as far back as 1942.¹⁸ Testing has since found asbestos in cosmetic talc, and the talcum-powder lawsuits grow out of that. Asbestos also surfaces now and then in imported goods.

And asbestos is still killing people. About 3,000 people are diagnosed with mesothelioma in the United States every year,¹⁹ plus thousands more with asbestos-related lung cancer and asbestosis. Because of the decades-long delay, the full toll of the asbestos era still hasn't been counted, and won't be for years.

Were you or a family member exposed to asbestos?

If you've been diagnosed with mesothelioma, lung cancer, or asbestosis, we can help you find out whether you have a claim. Exposure can trace back to a job, to a family member who carried fibers home on their clothes, to military service, to a product like talcum powder, or to living near a mine or plant.

Many asbestos products are covered by bankruptcy trusts, which can mean compensation is available even when the company responsible no longer exists, and many people have claims against more than one. You can learn more about filing an asbestos trust claim.

When you call, you reach our litigation team, not a screener. There's no fee unless we recover compensation for your family.

Call 833-4-ASBESTOS to speak with us about your case.

References

1. IARC. Arsenic, Metals, Fibres, and Dusts. IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, Vol 100C. International Agency for Research on Cancer; 2012.
2. Virta RL. Asbestos: Geology, Mineralogy, Mining, and Uses. US Geological Survey Open-File Report 02-149. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey; 2002.
3. Virta RL. Mineral Commodity Profiles—Asbestos. US Geological Survey Circular 1255-KK. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey; 2005.
4. Virta RL. Worldwide Asbestos Supply and Consumption Trends from 1900 through 2003. US Geological Survey Circular 1298. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey; 2006.
5. Yang FC, Zhang Y, Rheinstädter MC. The structure of people's hair. PeerJ. 2014;2:e619. doi:10.7717/peerj.619
6. Castleman BI. Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects. 5th ed. Aspen Publishers; 2005.
7. The Asbestos Fact Book. 3rd ed. Willow Grove, PA: Stover Publishing Co; 1953.
8. Ross M. Origins of the Word "Asbestos." International Environmental Research Foundation; 2002. http://www.ierfinc.org/Origin_of_the_Word_%20Asbestos.pdf
9. Solbes E, Harper RW. Biological responses to asbestos inhalation and pathogenesis of asbestos-related benign and malignant disease. J Investig Med. 2018;66(4):721-727. doi:10.1136/jim-2017-000628
10. History of the asbestos manufacturing industry. Asbestos. August 1935.
11. Schepers GWH. Chronology of asbestos cancer discoveries: experimental studies of the Saranac Laboratory. Am J Ind Med. 1995;27(4):593-606. doi:10.1002/ajim.4700270413
12. Doll R. Mortality from lung cancer in asbestos workers. Br J Ind Med. 1955;12(2):81-86. doi:10.1136/oem.12.2.81
13. Wagner JC, Sleggs CA, Marchand P. Diffuse pleural mesothelioma and asbestos exposure in the North Western Cape Province. Br J Ind Med. 1960;17(4):260-271.
14. Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Prods. Corp., 493 F.2d 1076 (5th Cir. 1973).
15. Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA, 947 F.2d 1201 (5th Cir. 1991).
16. US Environmental Protection Agency. Asbestos Part 1; Chrysotile Asbestos; Regulation of Certain Conditions of Use Under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Final rule. Fed Regist. 2024;89(61):21970-22010.
17. US Geological Survey. Asbestos. In: Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025. US Geological Survey; 2025. doi:10.3133/mcs2025.
18. Schultz RZ, Williams CR. Commercial talc: animal and mineralogical studies. J Ind Hyg Toxicol. 1942;24(4):75.
19. American Cancer Society. Key statistics about malignant mesothelioma. Accessed June 2026. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/malignant-mesothelioma/key-statistics.html

Key Sources

Badollet MS. Asbestos, a mineral of unparalleled properties. Trans Can Inst Min Metall. 1951;54:151-160.

Selikoff IJ, Lee DHK. Asbestos and Disease. Academic Press; 1978.