The Legends of Asbestos: Our Video Series on the Mineral That Wouldn't Burn

Between November 7 and November 18, 2025, we released eight short videos on YouTube called Legends of Asbestos. Each one takes an old story about asbestos, the "magic" mineral that would not burn, and asks how much of it is true. Here they are, a year later, with what the records show and what is only legend.

Pliny the Elder and the linen that grew in the desert

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?

Did Pliny the Elder Think Asbestos Was a Plant? came out on November 10, 2025. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder described a cloth that fire could not destroy. He filed it with flax and linen in Book 19 of his Natural History, and wrote that it grew in the sun-scorched deserts of India, where no rain falls, among deadly snakes. He said napkins of it were thrown into the fire at banquets and came out cleaner than water could wash them, and that kings were cremated in robes of it so their ashes stayed separate from the ashes of the pyre. He called it rare, hard to weave, and worth as much as the finest pearls.

He was wrong about where it came from. Asbestos is not a plant. It is a group of minerals that form in rock and can be split into soft fibers. Our Lexicon entries on Pliny the Elder and linum vivum, the "living linen," explain what he wrote. One thing he did not write is that the slaves who wove asbestos wore masks against its dust. His passage about face coverings is about workers polishing a red pigment, not asbestos.

The other seven legends

Ancient Greece's Eternal Flame (November 7, 2025). The golden lamp of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens. The Greek travel writer Pausanias, in the second century AD, wrote that it was filled with oil once a year, burned day and night, and had a wick of "Carpasian flax," the only flax that fire could not destroy. The fireproof wick is documented. The "eternal" flame was refilled every year.

The Asbestos Funeral Cloth That Survived Mount Vesuvius (November 11, 2025). Pliny's account of royal cremation robes is real, and Pliny himself died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. We have not found a reliable record of an asbestos shroud recovered at Pompeii or Herculaneum, so treat that part as legend. The fascination lasted: as late as 1684, a London merchant showed the Royal Society a piece of cloth from China that did not burn in their fire.

Did Charlemagne Use an Asbestos Tablecloth? (November 12, 2025). The emperor, who died in 814, supposedly threw his dirty tablecloth into the fire to amaze his guests and pulled it out clean. The asbestos industry loved this story: it appears in a 1928 Philip Carey booklet and a 1941 book on the "magic mineral". But no medieval source for it has been found. The food writer Nichola Fletcher looked for one, and the Charlemagne scholar Donald Bullough told her the tablecloth was "the purest of pure myths," a product of the Enlightenment.

Did Marco Polo Discover Asbestos in China? (November 13, 2025). He didn't discover it, but his account is real. In a province he called Chingintalas, at the edge of the desert, a Turkish companion named Zurficar told him how "salamander" cloth was made: dug from a vein in a mountain, crushed, washed, spun and woven, then whitened in fire. Polo insisted the salamander "is no beast" but a substance found in the earth. Berthold Laufer's 1915 study, Asbestos and Salamander, traces the legend.

The Fireproof Asbestos Napkin That Fooled Europe's Elite (November 14, 2025). Fire-cleaned napkins are well documented. Besides Pliny's banquet napkins, the Greek geographer Strabo described towels woven from a stone found at Carystus, in Greece, and cleaned in fire. No trick was involved; the cloth was mineral.

Benjamin Franklin's Asbestos Purse (November 17, 2025). This one is true. On June 2, 1725, the young Franklin, in London, wrote to the collector Sir Hans Sloane offering him "a Purse made of the Stone Asbestos." In his autobiography he said Sloane paid him handsomely for it. Sloane's collections later founded the British Museum, and the purse is now at the Natural History Museum in London. He most likely brought it from North America. The industry's trade journal retold the story in March 1939 (Asbestos, 1939).

The Asbestos Cat (November 18, 2025). Keasbey & Mattison of Ambler, Pennsylvania, put a cat on its boxes. In a 1996 California appeals case, a Navy veteran remembered a "very prominent" kitty-cat on the boxes of pipe insulation he used; the court identified it as the Keasbey & Mattison logo. The video tells the story that the cat came from a sermon by the evangelist Billy Sunday. We have not found a record that confirms where the cat came from.

Why the legends mattered

Every one of these stories is about the same thing: a fiber you could spin and weave that fire could not burn. That property took asbestos from curiosity to industry: pipe covering, boiler insulation, brake linings, cement pipe and shingles (how asbestos was used). The companies told the legends themselves. Keasbey & Mattison's 1940 booklet, Legends of Asbestos, retold the Athena lamp, Pliny, Charlemagne, Marco Polo and Franklin's purse, and ended each one with a plug for its own products.

What the legends left out was the dust. By 1940, doctors had been reporting lung scarring in asbestos workers for more than fifteen years. Our asbestos history pages show what the industry knew, and when.