C. E. Bryant and Vandiver Brown on Answering Douglas Aircraft About Stonefelt (1941)

Two Johns-Manville headquarters memos. On September 18, 1941, C. E. Bryant of J-M's Transportation Department told Vandiver Brown, the company's attorney, that an engineer at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California, reported laborers handling J-M's Stonefelt insulation (and Fiberglas) were complaining of itching, and wanted information "telling that Stonefelt will not cause infection and poisoning" in a form that could be shown to the employees. Brown replied on September 24 with the text of a letter for Douglas: Stonefelt, a form of rock wool, sometimes produced "a slight rash," but would "not produce silicosis or any other lung disorder."

What it shows

Brown's draft repeats the answer he wrote for North American Aviation a year earlier (his August 1940 text): a Metropolitan Life Insurance Company survey of J-M plants that found no silicosis among more than 400 workers, and experiments by Dr. Lawrence T. Fairhall of the Harvard School of Public Health that, he wrote, "definitely established that our Rock Wool contained nothing of a toxic or poisonous nature." In 1940 J-M's Elliot Fairback had revised that text to drop the claim of long experience with "this material" itself; the 1941 draft again claims "nearly forty years experience with this material or materials of substantially similar composition." Bryant noted that Brown had advised before on "how somewhat similar requests should be answered."

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Internal correspondence from C.E. Bryant to Mr. V. Brown, 9/18/41, on responding to inquiry from Douglas Aircraft Corp regarding Stonefelt. Draft dated 9/24/41 from V. Brown to C.E. Bryant refers to Harvard Study on Rock Wool products by Dr. Lawrence T. Fairhall. "His experiments definitely established that our Rock Wool contained nothing of a toxic or poisonous nature." Later correspondence, 6/6/44 from J.B. Brooks, deals with Stonefelt and any silicosis hazard. Vandiver Brown responds to J.B. Brooks in a letter dated 6/19/44, that mineral [rock] wool does not constitute a silicosis hazard.

Editor's note: The 1944 correspondence with J. B. Brooks that J-M's description mentions is not in this file, which holds only the September 1941 memos.

Related documents

• Elliot Fairback and Vandiver Brown on Answering North American Aviation About Stonefelt (1940)