Asbestos: A Materials Survey (1959)

The Bureau of Mines' survey of asbestos for the federal officials responsible for wartime and defense supplies. It is the revised edition of a survey first published in February 1952; the Bureau's cover letter, dated September 1958, says it was the first of its Materials Surveys to be revised.

Materials Surveys were meant to put in one document everything defense planners needed to know about a commodity: production, imports, consumption, exports, substitutes, the properties of the material, mining and milling, domestic and foreign reserves, and the structure of the industry, with history usually going back to 1935.

Why it matters

Written by the Bureau's longtime asbestos specialist, it is a detailed snapshot of the American asbestos industry in the 1950s: which fibers came from where, which industries used them, and how much.