Vandiver Brown to M. F. Judd of Raybestos-Manhattan, Enclosing His Dust Symposium Memorandum (1935)

A one-page letter of January 22, 1935, from Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's attorney, to M. F. Judd, secretary of Raybestos-Manhattan in Bridgeport, Connecticut, following a telephone call that afternoon. Brown encloses a copy of the memorandum he had prepared for Lewis H. Brown, J-M's president, on his trip to Pittsburgh on January 15 for the Symposium on Dust Problems held "under the auspices of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research." The five-page memorandum follows the letter.

What it shows

The letter shows J-M sharing its attorney's account of the symposium with its main competitor within days. The enclosed memorandum is written up in full at Vandiver Brown's memorandum on the Mellon Institute symposium: it records that only silica and asbestos were "definitely known" to cause disabling lung scarring, and Brown's view that the asbestos industry would cooperate with other dusty industries if it could be done "without an undue amount of publicity."

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Vandiver Brown sends a copy of his memo on the Dust Symposium, which he attended "under the auspices of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research," to the secretary at RM - Judd.

Related documents

• Vandiver Brown's Memorandum on the Mellon Institute Symposium on Dust Problems (1935)