Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on John L. Alden's Design of Industrial Exhaust Systems (1984)

A one-page Manville internal memo to file of October 22, 1984, from L. Gaul, on John L. Alden's Design of Industrial Exhaust Systems (The Industrial Press, 1939), from the "Boston Collection" at C.U. Medical Library. She writes that the book is "unrelated to the asbestos litigation" but quotes its preface: industry was "well informed of the need for exhaust sanitation" but not "as to how best to satisfy that need," in part because many in industry "have treated their accumulated data as precious trade secrets to be divulged neither to competitors nor to customers."

What it shows

This is one of a series of short memos written at Manville in the mid-1980s, while the company was defending asbestos lawsuits, recording what early books on industrial health said about dust and its control. The passage Gaul copied out says that by 1939 exhaust ventilation had been practiced for more than 70 years and recognized by statute for more than 40.