H. H. Robertson

The H. H. Robertson Company of Pittsburgh made Asbestos Protected Metal, steel roofing and siding sheets coated with asphalt and asbestos felt, from 1905; the product was later sold as Robertson Process Metal, and by 1969 the company sold an asbestos felt siding and roofing called Galbestos. It was still named as a defendant in a federal asbestos case in 2022. Our library holds no record of an asbestos bankruptcy or trust for the company.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History

In May 1920 the trade magazine Asbestos described the H. H. Robertson Company as "formerly the Asbestos Protected Metal Company" of Pittsburgh, and said a company booklet described its principal products as metal, asphalt and gypsum.⁶ The same issue placed it "among the larger users of Asbestos," in a note on the group life insurance it gave its employees.⁷ H. H. Robertson was the company's president; Asbestos listed him as president in its birthday notes from 1929 into the late 1940s.⁸

In November 1922 Asbestos published an article on the product by Andrew W. Crawford of the H. H. Robertson Company. He wrote that the first asbestos protected metal sheets were made in "a small plant at Canton, Mass., in 1905," that a larger plant was acquired at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1911, and that a still larger plant was begun at Ambridge, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1915 and finished in 1916. He said the Ambridge works covered more than six acres, included an asphalt refinery, and that almost 1,000 people worked in making and selling the product.² He named chemical and fertilizer makers and steel companies among its large users, because the sheets resisted fumes and salt air.²

The product

Crawford's article describes how the sheets were made. Black steel sheets were dipped in hot asphalt; "sheets of asbestos that have been previously impregnated with asphalt" were pressed into the coating, folded over the sides and sealed at the ends; a heavy waterproofing coat followed, and machines then corrugated the sheets or formed them into louvers and trim.² He wrote that the asbestos acted as "a permanent and indestructible shield, as well as a bond for the asphalts."²

In late 1922 the company arranged to use Johns-Manville's asbestos felt. Asbestos reported that on November 2, 1922, the company appointed Johns-Manville joint selling agents for Asbestos Protected Metal, "more recently known as Robertson Process Metal," which would be made at Ambridge with Johns-Manville asbestos saturated felts.³ In 1930 Johns-Manville's employee magazine said that perhaps the largest single item made by the roofing department of its factory at Asbestos, Quebec, was saturated asbestos felt for H. H. Robertson Co., Ltd., at Liverpool, England.⁹

A 1942 patent assigned to the company, for a protected metal sheet for roofing and siding, describes earlier roofing and siding sheets protected by asphalt and saturated asbestos felt, and proposes a sheet whose protective layers include an asbestos web.¹⁰ The Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases (1986) lists Galbestos as "asbestos felt, siding, roofing" as of 1969.⁴

Research at the Mellon Institute

Asbestos reported in March 1921 that the company had added Dr. A. F. Shupp to its fellowship staff at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh.¹ A July 1936 article in Asbestos says that a process for cementing asbestos to steel with metallic adhesives, tied mainly to the making of the company's roofing, had been announced in 1932. It says that a joint research program set up the year before by the American Rolling Mill Company and a fellowship on protected metals at the Mellon Institute, sponsored by H. H. Robertson, had led to a metal culvert covered with asbestos fabric bonded to galvanized iron by zinc, then coated with asphalt.¹¹ (See Armco Steel Corporation.)

Later years

In September 1969 Asbestos reported that National Gypsum Company had bought 550,000 shares of H. H. Robertson Company as an investment, describing Robertson as "an international construction company headquartered in Pittsburgh."¹² In May 1970 it reported that National Gypsum's further purchases had brought its holding to 25.5% of Robertson's shares, and said Robertson "manufactures, erects and sells metal building products."¹³ According to the 1986 Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, a compilation by plaintiffs' attorneys, National Gypsum resold its Robertson shares, which the book puts at 25 percent, on January 25, 1978.¹⁷¹⁸ A 1973 directory of asbestos users kept in Union Carbide's files lists the company at Two Gateway Center, Pittsburgh.¹⁴

In April 1975 a Union Carbide salesman reported from Freeman Chemical of Port Washington, Wisconsin, whose parent company he gave as H. H. Robertson, that Freeman's purchasing agent was upset with Union Carbide. The purchasing agent said Union Carbide had written to a Dr. Singleton of H. H. Robertson in a letter "which pointed out that our asbestos was hazardous to use," that Singleton had passed it to him, and that he had thrown it away "so that no one would see it." The salesman wrote that either Singleton and the purchasing agent had misread the letter or no one at Union Carbide had written it, and asked his colleagues to tell him of any such letter "so we can combat it."¹⁵ Freeman was then testing Union Carbide's Calidria RG-244 asbestos in resin.¹⁵

Lawsuits, bankruptcy and trust

H. H. Robertson Company is listed among the defendants in Pyle v. AH Bennett Co. (D.N.D. 2022), a federal ruling on disclosure under North Dakota's Asbestos Bankruptcy Trust Transparency Act. It was named in one of the two lawsuits the ruling covers.⁵ The caption of Data v. AO Smith Corporation, decided in the federal court for the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2021, lists among the defendants RCH New Co., II LLC, "an alleged successor to H.H. Robertson Company"; that is the plaintiffs' description in the caption, not a finding by the court.¹⁶ Our library holds no record of an asbestos bankruptcy or trust for the company.

References

1. Asbestos, March 1921, p. 55
2. Asbestos, November 1922, pp. 12–18 (Andrew W. Crawford, "Asbestos as a Building Material Protection")
3. Asbestos, November 1922, p. 53
4. Galbestos (H.H. Robertson), citing Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases, Volume Two (1986), p. 80
5. Pyle v. AH Bennett Co., 694 F. Supp. 3d 1173 (D.N.D. 2022)
6. Asbestos, May 1920, p. 56
7. Asbestos, May 1920, p. 30
8. Asbestos, April 1929, p. 53; Asbestos, April 1948, p. 40
9. The J-M Circle, May–June 1930, p. 13
10. Building Material (US Patent 2,286,120, 1942)
11. Asbestos, July 1936, p. 18 (R. L. Fine, "Asbestos Protected Culverts")
12. Asbestos, September 1969, p. 20
13. Asbestos, May 1970, p. 43
14. UC-935: Users of Asbestos Fibers: Directory of Manufacturers by Product Category (1973), p. 5
15. UC-615: Union Carbide Call Reports and Letter on Freeman Chemical's Evaluation of Calidria RG-244 (1971–1977), pp. 5–6
16. Data v. AO Smith Corporation (W.D. Pa., Feb. 11, 2021), caption
17. Barbara J. Peters and George A. Peters, Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases: Medical, Legal, and Engineering Aspects, vol. 2 (New York: Garland Law Publishing, 1986), p. 169.
18. Barbara J. Peters and George A. Peters, Sourcebook on Asbestos Diseases: Medical, Legal, and Engineering Aspects, vol. 2 (New York: Garland Law Publishing, 1986), p. 170.

Asbestos products

1 product our documents name H. H. Robertson as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Galbestos (H.H. Robertson)

Court cases

1 court decision in our case-law library name H. H. Robertson as a defendant.

• Pyle v. AH Bennett Co. (2022)

In the Union Carbide documents

H. H. Robertson is named in 4 Union Carbide documents dated 1973 to 1975 (4 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• Users of Asbestos Fibers: Directory of Manufacturers by Product Category (1973) UC-935 (mentioned)
• E. J. Kleber Report of Call on Freeman Chemical (Port Washington, WI) on the RG-244 Evaluation (1975) Union Carbide 326 (mentioned)
• E. J. Kleber Report of Call to Freeman Chemical (Port Washington, WI) on RG-244 Evaluation and a Letter About Asbestos Hazards (1975) UC-5031 (mentioned)
• Union Carbide Call Reports and Letter on Freeman Chemical's Evaluation of Calidria RG-244 (1971-1977) UC-615 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for H. H. Robertson, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: H. H. Robertson Co.

Where this comes from

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