Johns-Manville and Canadian Johns-Manville Correspondence on Firmin Dumortier's Asbestos Cigarette Filter (1959)

Twenty pages of memos, letters and a customer call report from September to December 1959 among N. W. Hendry of Canadian Johns-Manville's Asbestos Fibre Division, J. Q. Trice and H. G. Donovan of the Manville Research Center, M. Babinski of the Patent Department and J. G. Battersby in Philadelphia. They concern Firmin Dumortier, a Montreal apartment building manager and spare-time inventor who had a Canadian patent application for asbestos cigarette filters and claimed that asbestos "made a far superior filter than anything on the market today." A Canadian J-M salesman estimated that if all filter makers switched, J-M could sell about 30,000 more tons of group 4 fiber a year. In December Hendry closed the matter: "It is not our intention at this time to become involved in any Research program on the possible use of asbestos as a cigarette filter medium."

What it shows

Trice of the Research Center wrote that the use of asbestos in filter tips "is not new," and that his understanding was that Kent cigarettes had originally used crocidolite (see Micronite filter). His own earlier tests had found that asbestos filtered too well: "the only sensation that got through to the mouth was of hot air." Battersby noted that the Surgeon General had just reported that cigarette filters did "nothing whatsoever to reduce the hazards of lung cancer," and asked for data on J-M's Plastibest fibers before approaching the tobacco companies. The Patent Department found that Dumortier had only an application, not an enforceable patent, and that J-M's own earlier application for a glass fiber filter with an asbestos paper sleeve had been abandoned. The papers weigh market size, patents and filtering power; none of them discusses whether asbestos fibers in a filter could reach the smoker.