painters | Mesothelioma Claims

What the asbestos industry's own magazines said about paint and painters

The trade journal Asbestos and Johns-Manville's company magazines wrote for the people who mined, made and sold asbestos. They seldom wrote about painters. But they wrote often about paint, and the record runs from the 1800s to 1981.

Asbestos in the can

The H. W. Johns Company, which later became part of Johns-Manville, sold "asbestos liquid paints" by 1881, alongside roof coatings and roofing (J-M Circle, Oct. 1928). One longtime employee recalled that its asbestos paint became "the leading paint of the time" before the company dropped it and Pittsburgh Plate Glass took over the line (J-M Circle, Oct. 1928).

In 1920 the secretary of the Paint Manufacturers' Association explained the trade's use of asbestos-type pigment in Asbestos magazine:

• Its largest use was to keep paint from settling hard in the can (Asbestos, July 1920).
• It had "won general favor" in prepared paints of all types. High-grade paint formulas averaged "about fifteen per cent" of what he called "asbestos" (Asbestos, July 1920).
• The U.S. Navy mixed "a rather high percentage of asbestiform pigment" with red lead during the war (Asbestos, July 1920).
• A fire-retardant paint sold as "Pamak", with asbestine as its largest pigment, was licensed to some fifty manufacturers (Asbestos, July 1920).

In 1923 a Canadian survey counted 21 paint companies using 2,438,189 pounds of asbestine (Asbestos, Oct. 1923).

Mixing it on the job

A 1926 article, translated from German, explained how asbestos paint was made up. The asbestos was "ground as fine as possible," stirred into diluted "painter's waterglass," and put on in two coats (Asbestos, Aug. 1926). It preferred a dry mix of asbestos powder, so "the user then needs to add only the requisite amount of water" (Asbestos, Aug. 1926). Such paints, it said, went chiefly on roofs and storage rooms.

In 1930 the magazine announced Color-Bestos, a fireproof wall and ceiling paint that "may be either sprayed or brushed on." It was sold for walls of plaster, celotex and wallboard, and for furnaces and furnace pipes (Asbestos, Aug. 1930). In 1934 the magazine named the painter among the tradesmen who "can and should use asbestos in some form" (Asbestos, Dec. 1934).

Named jobs

What it said about health

In the pages we read, health comes up only in the 1970s:

• In 1975 the EPA shut Celotex's "small asbestos-paint factory" at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after "hazardous" asbestos emissions were found (Asbestos, Aug. 1975).
• In 1978 the Consumer Product Safety Commission named dry-mix texture paint as one of three products of "significant concern" for releasing asbestos fiber, and proposed banning its sale to consumers (Asbestos, Nov. 1978).
• In 1981, 53 "carpenters, painters and plumbers" at Springfield Hospital Center, listed under Maryland, signed a grievance saying they were "forced to work with asbestos without taking adequate precautions" (Asbestos, June 1981).