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General Electric

The General Electric Company, the American electrical manufacturer, used asbestos in wire and cable insulation and in molded and laminated plastics, and bought asbestos fiber by the carload. Union Carbide sales and safety records from the 1970s record its medical staff's views on asbestos and its 1972 decision to stop making asbestos-filled phenolic molding material. Our case-law library holds 237 decisions naming it as a defendant, and the library records no asbestos bankruptcy or trust for it.

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Asbestos in General Electric products

General Electric used asbestos in electrical insulation. In 1923 Asbestos reported that the Underwriters' Laboratories list included re-examination service on asbestos-covered fixture wire made by General Electric among others.8 In 1932 F. S. Mapes, an engineer in General Electric's testing laboratory at Schenectady, wrote in the journal that "the electrical industry consumes large quantities" of asbestos cloth, tape, yarn and roving, and described how the company tested asbestos textiles for magnetic iron, which can cause short circuits.9 A 1935 General Electric catalog, Industrial Cable, gave thirteen pages to asbestos types of cable; as the journal quoted it, the company called itself "the pioneer of asbestos insulations."2

Plastics were the other large use. In January 1938 the journal reported that General Electric's Plastics Department used about twenty-four carloads of asbestos fiber a year, most of it in cold-molded products at Meriden, Connecticut, and much in heat-resistant phenolic hot-molded products at its new plant at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, while its Lynn, Massachusetts, plant used asbestos fabric and asbestos paper in laminated plastics.3 In 1945 the journal described Textolite, a General Electric plastic for Navy use in which researchers chose asbestos fibers bound with phenolic resins as the filler.10 In 1948 it reported Terratex, an insulating paper of asbestos and a mineral binder such as clay, developed at the company's Pittsfield laboratory.11

The journal also reported in 1939 that General Electric used "a great quantity of asbestos" from the Globe district of Arizona in installing the hydroelectric generators at Boulder Dam.12 A 1986 reference book lists several General Electric trade names as asbestos products, among them Deltabeston ("asbestos-insulated conductors"), Deltabetos magnet wire, Salamander wire, O.N.C. cable and Terratex paper.13 As late as 1968, P. O. Nicodemus, a chemist in General Electric's Wire and Cable Department at Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke to the Asbestos Textile Institute on asbestos textile electrical insulations, including the newer materials replacing them.14

What the Union Carbide documents show

Most of the library's General Electric documents are Union Carbide records, many of them from Union Carbide's efforts to sell General Electric its asbestos.7

On June 18, 1971, safety and medical staff of General Electric, Hooker Chemical and Union Carbide met to discuss handling asbestos in making phenolic resins.4 The Union Carbide memo on the meeting places it at the Hooker Chemical Corporation plant in Niagara Falls, while a Union Carbide call report a month later says Dr. Paff attended a meeting at "Hooker, Grand Island, N.Y."45 General Electric sent David H. Guilbault, its safety administrator, and Dr. David G. Paff, associate medical director, both of Pittsfield.4 Union Carbide's R. W. Schwartz wrote that Dr. Paff's view was that the effect of asbestos on people "is not completely understood," but that asbestos "must, under certain conditions of fiber size and concentration, be considered dangerous to humans."4 The memo records that General Electric used the same respirator as Hooker, that General Electric and Hooker reported "a number of trials but no real success" with closed systems for handling asbestos, and that all three companies found their control of dust from empty bags "not completely satisfactory."4

A month later a Union Carbide salesman, B. L. Ingalls, called on Dr. Paff about samples of Union Carbide's pelletized asbestos that had been sent to him.5 His report says Dr. Paff told him General Electric used considerable quantities of asbestos in its phenolic molding compounds, and that its Medical Department regarded the present production facilities as a potential hazard.5 The salesman recorded Dr. Paff's opinion that chrysotile carried potential hazards of asbestosis and cancer, with definite correlations to lung cancer but, in his view, no concrete correlation to mesothelioma, and that "much of the concern and furrow over asbestos today is more due to panic and sensationalism than to fact."5

On October 5, 1972, S. B. Nelson of Union Carbide's Boston sales office reported that General Electric planned to stop making heat-resistant phenolic molding material with asbestos filler.6 He wrote that staff at General Electric's Plainville, Connecticut, plant gave two reasons: the company did not want to spend on equipment to meet OSHA requirements, and one of its locations molding asbestos material had been cited for violating OSHA regulations on asbestos in the air.6 He added that General Electric's salesmen were stressing the hazards molders faced, and that the Plainville plant described an internal policy for all General Electric plants to find substitutes.6 A Union Carbide memo of November 22, 1972, says General Electric had announced it would stop making and molding all asbestos-containing products at the end of 1972, and that Union Carbide's asbestos supplier, which the memo calls Carey, had expected to keep supplying General Electric with large quantities of asbestos.15

In 1975 Union Carbide tried to sell General Electric's Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, its RG-600 asbestos for reinforcing polypropylene.16 A plastics engineer there asked whether Union Carbide could supply 150,000 to 300,000 pounds in 1976, and after a seminar in November the salesman, Edward J. Kleber, reported a potential of about 1,000,000 pounds a year.16 He also wrote that General Electric's medical department felt any concentration above 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter would require medical examinations, "a step they are not willing to take."17 In December the engineer said General Electric's medical staff had told him GAF had just lost a lawsuit over the medical-examination part of the regulation the report cites as 1910.93A, and by March 1976 the engineer was not allowed to open the drums of resin containing RG-600 until new OSHA rules clarified who needed examinations.1819 In 1979 the same salesman wrote that a General Electric plastics product manager in Louisville remembered "the good old days" when the company used asbestos in its phenolics.20

In June 1982 Hilton C. Lewinsohn, a lecturer in epidemiology at Yale, sent J. Wister Meigs a draft proposal asking General Electric to help fund a study of six former General Electric employees recorded in the Connecticut Tumor Registry as having died of malignant mesothelioma.21 The proposal calls them "an unusual cluster," states that the authors' Connecticut work to date suggested occupational asbestos exposure accounted for eighty-five per cent of the state's mesothelioma cases, and lists investigating "any known exposure to asbestos at G-E" among its aims.21 The library does not show whether General Electric took part.

In the courts

Our case-law library holds 237 decisions that name General Electric as a defendant.7 In Air and Liquid Systems Corp. v. DeVries (2019), where General Electric was one of five businesses whose equipment was used on Navy ships, the U.S. Supreme Court held that under maritime law a maker must warn when its product requires a part, it knows or has reason to know the finished product is likely to be dangerous, and it has no reason to think users will realize the danger; the Court rejected the "bare-metal defense."22

References

  1. Asbestos magazine, November 1938, p. 40
  2. Asbestos magazine, January 1935, p. 10
  3. Asbestos magazine, January 1938, p. 25
  4. Union Carbide exhibit UC-446: R. W. Schwartz to R. F. Valois on a safety meeting with General Electric and Hooker Chemical, June 24, 1971, pp. 1–4
  5. Union Carbide exhibit UC-545: B. L. Ingalls call report on General Electric, Pittsfield, July 19, 1971, pp. 1–2
  6. Union Carbide exhibit UC-5303: S. B. Nelson to P. B. Potter on General Electric's plan to discontinue asbestos-filled phenolic molding material, October 5, 1972, pp. 1–2
  7. General Electric company page
  8. Asbestos magazine, December 1923, p. 42
  9. Asbestos magazine, October 1932, p. 21
  10. Asbestos magazine, June 1945, p. 28
  11. Asbestos magazine, February 1948, p. 22
  12. Asbestos magazine, February 1939, p. 12
  13. Deltabeston (G.E.) product page, citing Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, vol. 2; see also the Deltabetos, Salamander, O.N.C. and Terratex product pages
  14. Asbestos magazine, June 1968, p. 3
  15. Union Carbide exhibit UC-189: memo to R. E. Nicolson on asbestos filler used in phenolic molding compounds, November 22, 1972, pp. 1–2
  16. Union Carbide exhibit UC-545: E. J. Kleber call reports on General Electric, Louisville, October 23 and November 13, 1975, pp. 3–5
  17. Union Carbide exhibit UC-545: E. J. Kleber call report on the RG-600 seminar at Appliance Park, November 13, 1975, p. 4
  18. Union Carbide exhibit UC-4146: E. J. Kleber call report on General Electric, Louisville, December 10, 1975
  19. Union Carbide exhibit UC-2204: E. J. Kleber call report on General Electric, Louisville, March 4, 1976
  20. Union Carbide exhibit UC-545: E. J. Kleber call report on General Electric, Louisville, March 13, 1979, p. 7
  21. Union Carbide exhibit UC-4221: Hilton C. Lewinsohn to J. Wister Meigs enclosing a draft proposal to General Electric, June 1, 1982, pp. 1–6
  22. Air and Liquid Systems Corp. v. DeVries (U.S. Supreme Court, 2019)

People

People the documents tie to General Electric, most often named first, with the titles the documents give them.

Asbestos products

6 products our documents name General Electric as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

Court cases

237 court decisions in our case-law library name General Electric as a defendant, newest first.

And 87 more: search the case law.

In our library

1 document in our library name General Electric, by collection.

Other library documents (1)

In the Union Carbide documents

General Electric is named in 38 Union Carbide documents dated 1932 to 2002 (38 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. 37 of them are published in our collection.

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for General Electric, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: General Electric Company · General Electric Co · GE · G.E · General-Electric Corporation · General Electric Company, Appliance Division.

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names General Electric, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.

Mentioned on this site

Cite this page

“General Electric.” AsbestosClaims.Law Library. https://asbestosclaims.law/library/organizations/general-electric.

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